What takes you back to old remembered places and half-forgotten memories? What makes you revisit forgotten parts of your life? Madame Pamplemousse and the Time-Travelling Café explores the idea that taste can make you go back in time and visit parts of history. A contraption that looks like a coffee-machine, fed with the right ingredients, can recreate in your imagination a time that is so vivid that you go back there yourself! In this sweet book set in Monsieur Moutarde's French café in Montmartre, we meet a white cat called Camembert who wears an eye-patch, a young girl, a scientist - and of course, Madame Pamplemousse herself. A quick and easy read, it uses a lighthearted style of storytelling to take you on a crazy adventure. Title Madame Pamplemousse and the Time-Travelling Café Author Rupert Kingfisher Genre Adventure/Fantasy Rating (out of 5) 3 Age-group 7+ … [Read more...]

When I started reading Being Billy, I felt uncomfortable, but I did not know why. I just could not lay my finger on what made me draw into myself and step back from the book. After a few pages, I realised I was supposed to feel uncomfortable. The book wanted to reach within me and squeeze something that I had buried deep within. For as long as I resisted that, the book made me uncomfortable. The moment I allowed it to touch me, I sobbed my heart out. Sitting in a train, oblivious to the world around me, I sniffed and licked the salty tears that poured down my cheeks. Billy is a young boy forced to be older than he is. A 'lifer' at a home, surrounded by carers whom he calls 'scummers', Billy has only one soft point: his twin siblings six years younger than he is. Other than that, Billy is just a mix of violence and anger, unwilling to be loved, deliberately shoving people out of his … [Read more...]

Clover Twig is a very tidy girl with very neat hair. She is very particular about things being clean and proper. She won't do anything she is told not to do. In other words, she has a little bit of an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. When Clover begins to work for the witch Mrs Eckles, she welcomes the challenge. But working with a witch is never easy, however nice the witch may be. Worst of all, good old Mrs Eckles has a nasty sister who wants to steal Mrs Eckles's cottage! It could all have been a nice domestic legal dispute if it hadn't been for the fact that 'stealing' the house in witch language is actually stealing the whole thing and taking it to Castle Coldiron. When you try to summarise the story of Clover Twig and the Incredible Flying Cottage, it sounds incredibly like the kind of boring, outdated fairy tale that should have been lost to collective memory years ago, but it is … [Read more...]