What Miss T Read

Since her mother’s disappearance, eleven-year-old Tilly has found comfort in stories at Pages & Co., her grandparents’ bookshop. But when her favourite characters, Anne of Green Gables and Alice from Wonderland, appear in the shop, Tilly’s adventures become very real. Not only can she follow Anne and Alice into their thrilling worlds, she discovers she can bookwander into any story she chooses. Tilly’s new ability could even help her solve the mystery of what happened to her mother all those years ago. But danger may be lurking on the very next page… When I read this I genuinely felt like this is the book that had been missing from my life.  Pages & Co - Tilly and the Bookwanderers is the first instalment in Anna James' series, featuring Tilly, a book-loving young girl who lives with her grandparents in their bookshop Pages & Co. From the very start I was invested. Who wouldn't want to live in a bookshop? And if, like me, you spend an awful lot of time in bookshops,

What is a bumbershoot? Or a moonbow? And what does it mean when someone absquatulates...?  Test your knowledge with more than 400 words to amaze, confuse and inspire budding wordsmiths (and adults). All of the words featured in this book are difficult to spell, hard to say and their meanings are obscure to most children (and most adults)! The Dictionary of Difficult Words has been on my bookshelf for a while now and is a firm favourite within my classroom. I first saw it on Twitter about 6 months ago, when a flurry of fellow twitter teachers were purchasing and using it in their classrooms. Keen to improve vocabulary in my own classroom and because of my own love of words, it wasn't long until this fantastic book found its way into my hands.  The book is written by Jane Solomon, a lexicographer (the definition is explained within the book of course!) and illustrated beautifully by Louise Lockhart and each page brings an eclectic exuberance of words. Written in alphabetical order, t

Eleven-year-old Mouse is travelling to see his grandparents on Christmas Eve with his mother and two sisters. But it's snowing, visibility is bad and the car goes off the road, and crashes.  Mouse is thrown from the car.  When he wakes, he's not in his world any more. He meets a sheep named Bar, who can only say Baaa, and a sarcastic horse named Nonky, who is a surprising mix of his beloved toy horse and his older sister. So begins a quest to find a castle in a world of wonder - a world of monsters, minstrels, dangerous knights and mysterious wizards; a world of terrifying danger but also more excitement than Mouse has ever known. When I found this book lurking in my local charity bookshop I almost let out an external squeal. I'd just finished reading The Last Wild and loved it, AND this is an excellent condition proof copy, and there's something slightly magical about proof copies.  Piers Torday yet again transports you to a magical, yet believable world

Eleven-year-old Maggie lives in Fennis Wick, enclosed and protected from the outside world by a boundary, beyond which the Quiet War rages and the dirty, dangerous wanderers roam.   Her brother Jed is an eldest, revered and special. A hero. Her younger brother is Trig - everyone loves Trig. But Maggie’s just a middler, invisible and left behind. Then, one hot September day, she meets Una, a hungry wanderer girl in need of help, and everything Maggie has ever known gets turned on its head.  The Middler had been sat on my imaginary to be read pile for a looooong time. Imaginary because it's full of the books I don't own but have already read reviews of and those that I'm desperate to get my hands on. So when I spotted a copy on offer in Morrisons of all places I snapped it up immediately.  The Middler follows the story of Maggie, a middle child (hence The Middler), forever jealous of the eldests - the older children who are sent off to war to help fight for th

A horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow impossible though it seems they may still be alive. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children really took me by surprise. It wasn't what I was expecting AT ALL. I'd seen the film trailers, but not the actual film and picked this up on a whim from my local charity shop, thinking it would be a nice but spooky children's novel that might fill the void of "scary books" that my class are always clamouring for. How wrong I was.  First up, this is definitely a Young Adult novel, not your usual "middle grade" book. This is mai

Harrison Beck is reluctantly joining his travel-writer Uncle Nat for the last journey of the royal train, The Highland Falcon. But as the train makes its way to Scotland, a priceless brooch goes missing, and things are suddenly a lot more interesting. As suspicions and accusations run high among the passengers, Harrison begins to investigate and uncovers a few surprises along the way. Can he solve the mystery of the jewel thief and catch the culprit before they reach the end of the line? I'm a little late to the party with my review of this rip-roaring adventure but boy was it worth the wait. Those of you who, like me, read an exceptional amount of children's fiction, will no doubt be familiar with M.G Leonard's Beetle Boy series (a firm favourite of mine) and she has joined forces with friend, and debut novelist, Sam Sedgman in this action-packed adventure.  The Highland Falcon Thief follows Harrison Beck (Hal for short), a young adventurous lad, stuck on a trai

Chaya can talk her way out of anything - except stealing the Queen's jewels. Even if she had the best of reasons...So she escapes on the back of a stolen elephant and leads her friends on a jungle adventure, where leeches lurk and revolution is stirring. And this gives Chaya an idea. Maybe she can leave her village a thief but return a hero? A sunny day in isolation and I knew exactly what I was going to pick up. The Girl Who Stole and Elephant has been sitting on my bookshelf for a while now after picking it up when it was first released. The children at school have loved it and the two weeks' work we did around the book in our Authorfy club (would highly recommend) built up plenty of excitement around the book. I still have the proof copy left to give away to one lucky author of the term when we do return to school! I devoured this in one day and it really was a story that I couldn't put down thanks to the non-stop action. It's been a while since I read a