Walk of the Whales

 By: Nick Bland  

Location: PIC BLA

Genre: Whales of fun

When all of the whales in the ocean leave their home to walk around on land, people don’t quite know what to think.

When all of the whales in the ocean leave their home to walk around on land, people don't quite know what to think. But soon shopkeepers go out of business, farms are flooded with water and salt, and people shout horrible, anti-whale words. That is, until, a smart little girl decides to ask the whales what everyone can do to help. A powerful and entertaining story about the environment from best-selling author, Nick Bland.

Alice with a why- REturn to Wonderland

 By: Anna James   

Location: FIC JAM

Genre: Fantasy

Sue: This story is light and entertaining. It feels like it’s been ages since I last read something that actually reignited my love for reading. A quick and easy read!

Return to Wonderland in this extraordinary reimagining of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by one of our most brilliant storytellers
England, 1919. Alyce – with a Y – lives with her grandmother, the original Alice, having lost her father during the great war. When a mysterious invitation to a tea party hits her square in the face, Alyce realises her grandmother’s strange stories of a place called Wonderland might have some truth to them after all.

But the land Alyce finds herself in feels different to the Wonderland of her grandmother’s stories – for it is trapped in its own war. The Sun King and the Queen of the Moon are fighting over a stolen hour, and soon Alyce is tasked with setting it right. With the help of the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and a Sailor Fox, Alyce will have to solve Wonderland’s problems and, eventually, find her way back home.
enchanting adventure through Wonderland, and featuring new characters as well as old favourites, Alice With a Why is both a celebration of Lewis Carroll’s beloved original story, and a modern masterpiece.

Little Foxes

 By: Michael Morpurgo  

Location: FIC MOR

Genre: Animals

Lara's review:

This was an all right short read.

A boy named Billy is shuffled around various foster homes. He never stays for long. He has stuttering problems until one day, he meets a swan and he saves it and whilst he talks to it he stops stuttering.

He eventually comes across a family of foxes- a vixen and four cubs. The vixen is later killed by a car and he buries it and promises that he will take care of the cubs for her.

They are seen as vermin though and they are gassed and killed- all but one die. So he takes the remaining fox and tries to take it back to his foster home. His foster mother however tells him that if he wants to keep that fox he must leave.

They go on a run through the countryside, avoiding humans until they meet a man on a boat.
He eventually releases the fox and gets a new home, this time it's permament. He ends up living with that man and his wife because they just lost a son that was similar age to him.


There are a lot of lessons in this book -about taking care of nature, trusting people and knowing when it's time to let go and that wild animals can never be pets no matter how hard we try.


It's a lovely short book about nature and bonds that can form between humans and animals.

A spellbinding animal story from War Horse author and former Children's Laureate, Michael Morpurgo. Bullied at school, nagged in Aunty May's tenth-floor council flat, there's only one place ten-year-old Billy really feels alive – in the wilderness by the canal. 

There he watches a cygnet on the water and protects a family of fox cubs. Then his secret place is discovered and the fox family decimated. Unwanted and unloved, Billy and the last fox run for their lives … A gripping and poignant animal adventure from the master storyteller of An Eagle in the Snow, Listen to the Moon, Shadow, and An Elephant in the Garden.  –––  Former Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo needs no introduction.

 He is one of the most successful children's authors in the country, loved by children, teachers and parents alike. Michael has written more than forty books for children including the global hit War Horse, which was made into a Hollywood film by Steven Spielberg in 2011. Several of his other stories have been adapted for screen and stage, including My Friend Walter, Why the Whales Came and Kensuke's Kingdom. Michael has won the Whitbread Award, the Smarties Award, the Circle of Gold Award, the Children's Book Award and has been short-listed for the Carnegie Medal four times.

 He started the charity Farms for City Children in 1976 with his wife, Clare, aimed at relieving the “poverty of experience… many young children feel in inner city and urban areas. Michael is also a patron of over a dozen other charities. Living in Devon, listening to Mozart and working with children have provided Michael with the ideas and incentive to write his stories. He spends half his life mucking out sheds with the children, feeding sheep or milking cows; the other half he spends dreaming up and writing stories for children. "For me, the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out – the writing down of it I always find hard. But I love finishing it, then holding the book in my hand and sharing my dream with my readers." 

Alone

 By: Megan Freeman 

  Location: Fic Fre

Genre: Adventure

Perfect for fans of Hatchet and the I Survived series, this harrowing middle grade debut novel-in-verse from a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet tells the story of a young girl who wakes up one day to find herself utterly alone in her small Colorado town.

When twelve-year-old Maddie hatches a scheme for a secret sleepover with her two best friends, she ends up waking up to a nightmare. She’s alone—left behind in a town that has been mysteriously evacuated and abandoned.

With no one to rely on, no power, and no working phone lines or internet access, Maddie slowly learns to survive on her own. Her only companions are a Rottweiler named George and all the books she can read. After a rough start, Maddie learns to trust her own ingenuity and invents clever ways to survive in a place that has been deserted and forgotten.

As months pass, she escapes natural disasters, looters, and wild animals. But Maddie’s most formidable enemy is the crushing loneliness she faces every day. Can Maddie’s stubborn will to survive carry her through the most frightening experience of her life?

This Princess Kills Monsters

 By: R Y Herman 

Location: FIC HER

Genre: Fantasy

A princess with a mostly useless magical talent takes on horrible monsters, a dozen identical masked heroes, and a talking lion in a quest to save a kingdom—and herself—in this affectionate satire of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale The Twelve Huntsmen.

Someone wants to murder Princess Melilot. This is sadly normal.

Melilot is sick of being ordered to go on dangerous quests by her domineering stepmother. Especially since she always winds up needing to be rescued by her more magically talented stepsisters. And now, she's been commanded to marry a king she’s never met.

When hideous spider-wolves attack her on the journey to meet her husband-to-be, she is once again rescued—but this time, by twelve eerily similar-looking masked huntsmen. Soon, she has to contend with near-constant attempts on her life, a talking lion that sets bewildering gender tests, and a king who can't recognize his true love when she puts on a pair of trousers. And all the while, she has to fight her growing attraction to not only one of the huntsmen, but also her fiancé’s extremely attractive sister.

If Melilot can't unravel the mysteries and rescue herself from peril, kingdoms will fall. Worse, she could end up married to someone she doesn’t love.

Vera or Faith

 By: Gary Shteyngart  

Location: FIC SHT

Genre: Realistic Life

A poignant, sharp-eyed, and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly coming apart, told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter, by the bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Our Country Friends

The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original.

Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.

Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child. With a nod to What Maisie Knew, Henry James's classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, Vera, or Faith demonstrates why Shteyngart is, in the words of The New York Times, "one of his generation's most exhilarating writers."

REVIEW from  Angela at Goodreads

I enjoy stories told from the perspective of children who are often precocious. Ten year old Vera stole my heart from the start. It was heartbreaking to feel her anxiety believing she’s been abandoned by her birth mother, anxious that her parents would get a divorce and her second mom would abandon her. I couldn’t quite figure out her parents, disliked them , especially her father. Vera does figure them out eventually as she struggles to come to grips with her relationships and desperately tries to find her birth mom. It was heartbreaking to feel the stress of this little girl, as she struggles to make a friend and is made fun of at school. Heartbreaking as she shakes and shakes her hands until she can think of something else as she suffers through recess. Vera’s “Things I Still Need to Know Diary” will make you laugh and cry at the same time as she records vocabulary words and phrases she hears from the adults around her as she tries, but doesn’t always succeed in putting them in the right context .

There is a bit of AI and a self driving car . There’s a commentary on democracy, scary and feeling much too relevant like it could have been out of today’s news. There is an upcoming constitutional amendment vote in the states to “decide whether to give “an enhanced vote” counting for five thirds of a regular vote to so-called “exceptional Americans, “ those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War, but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.” Relevant to Vera as she is Korean American and in a school debate she has to take the side for the amendment. Bottom line is that in spite of the quirks and turns in the story line, Vera is a force of nature, and really just a kid who wants to be loved and I couldn’t help but love her .

Greymist Fair

 By: Francesca Zappia  

Location: FIC ZAP

Genre: Fantasy

 whimsical horror

A Suspenseful Young Adult Murder Mystery Inspired by the Original Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales

“Sharp and accessible.”— School Library Journal

 “Illustrates the revolutionary power of love, kindness, and community.”— Publishers Weekly “

 Fans of retellings will enjoy finding many hidden tropes in the warm, original fantasy.” — Kirkus Reviews

 The villagers of Greymist Fair know that the woods are a dangerous and magical place, and that they should never set foot off the road. But when a young tailor discovers a body, her search for the culprit reveals even more strange and dark happenings around her town. From acclaimed author Francesca Zappia, Greymist Fair is a suspenseful and inventive murder-mystery infused with magic and inspired by the lesser-known fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Two roads lead into a dark forest. They meet at Greymist Fair, the village hidden in the trees, a place kept alive by the families that never leave. The people of Greymist Fair know the woods are a dangerous and magical place, and to set foot off the road is to invite trouble. When Heike, the village’s young tailor, discovers a body on the road, she goes looking for who is responsible. But her quest only leads to more strange happenings around Greymist Fair. Inspired by the original, bloody, lesser-known fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, acclaimed author Francesca Zappia crafts an enthralling murder-mystery that will keep readers turning the pages. Told from multiple points of view, with each narrative building on the crime discovered by Heike, Greymist Fair examines the themes of childhood fears, growing into adult responsibilities, and finding a place to call home amid the trials of life and death. Features chapter decorations by the author throughout, as well as a map.