Books to put under the Christmas tree!

Here is a selection of some of the best books published in the past year, for all ages from babies to Young Adults. Which one will you ask Santa for? 😉

Bathtime for Little Rabbit by Jörg Mühle

Little Rabbit is going to have a bath and he needs your help if he is going to be squeaky clean! Can you help him turn the tap? How about blowing away the bubbles on his head? And can you rub him dry? A lovely, interactive book for very little ones! (ages 0-3)

Yoga Babies by Fearne Cotton and Sheena Dempsey

‘We’re the yoga babies, see what we can do!’ Roll out your mats and pull on your yoga pants for this one! Follow a tribe of babies as they try a range of simple poses explained through bright, friendly illustrations and a bouncy rhyming text. Whatever the mood (cranky, lazy or over-excited), there’s a pose for that! (ages 2-6)

Triangle by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen

Cheeky Triangle, who lives in a triangular house with a triangular door and triangular windows, wants to play a good joke on its friend Square (who lives in a square house, etc.). This is a really funny story where the humour is carried by very few words and wonderfully expressive minimalist pictures. This new book from the award-winning duo who gave us the brilliant Sam and Dave Dig a Hole is a gem! (ages 4-7)

Jabari Jumps by Gaia Cornwall

Jabari has passed his swimming test. He is ready to jump off the diving board. At least, that’s what he’s saying… It will take the gentle guidance of his dad and his own pluck to help Jabari through his self-appointed challenge. Fabulous illustrations of a sunny day at the pool will have you long for summer. (ages 4-7)

Charlie and Mouse by Laurel Snyder and Emily Hughes

Follow brothers Charlie and Mouse as they go about their day, attending an imaginary party or trying to make a couple of coins selling rocks. Three stories in a book that will bring lots of smiles to young readers’ faces (and their grown-ups’, too). Charlie and Mouse is ideal for beginner readers who can combine sounding out and their knowledge of tricky words to make their own way through the book. (ages 5-7)

This Is How We Do It by Matt Lamothe

How do kids around the world go to school? What do they wear? What games do they play? And what do they get for breakfast? Find out all about it and much more in this beautiful book following one day in the lives of real families in Japan, Uganda, Russia, Iran, Peru, India and Italy. (ages 5-8)

Nevermoor by Jessica Townsend

An action-packed and magic-filled adventure featuring Morrigan Crow who is a perfectly nice and normal girl except… except that she is cursed! Anything that goes wrong (from burnt toast to heart attacks) is blamed on her and to top it all she is meant to die on her eleventh birthday. It’s no fun being Morrigan Crow! But then the mysterious Jupiter North turns up and everything changes… If you’ve loved Harry Potter, this is one for you! (ages 9-12)

Wed Wabbit by Lissa Evans

When Fidge finds herself accidentally falling into a magical world in her awful cousin Graham’s basement, the last thing she expects to meet is a bunch of toys from her little sister’s bedroom. Toys that have somehow come to life and, for some of them, developed very nasty personalities. There’s tons going on here and it’s so, so funny. A brilliant read! (ages 9-12)

The Unintentional Adventures of the Bland Sisters by Kara Lareau and Jen Hill

Sisters Kale and Jaundice Bland LOVE their very boring lives: always the same, always predictable, no surprises, be they good or bad. But when they get kidnapped by a bunch of crazy pirates, things are thrown upside down and they don’t like it one little bit. Come aboard for a zany adventure, you won’t regret it! (ages 9-12)

The Lotterys Plus One by Emma Donoghue and Caroline Hadiladsono

Meet the Lotterys, a family of two dads, two mums and seven children, plus an assortment of pets all living in the rambling house of Camelottery. Life is a bit mad for narrator Sumac with so many siblings and grownups to deal with, but it’s nothing compared to what happens when Grumps (a cranky grandad she’s never met) comes to live with them. (ages 12+)

Who Let the Gods Out? by Maz Evans

Elliot’s life is hard enough as he tries to hide the fact that Mam is slowly but literally losing her mind. Yet things are going to get a lot more complicated as a young Greek goddess lands in his garden shed and as they accidentally free the Daemon of Death from his millennial prison under Stonehenge. Cue a mad race to track him down and bring him back behind bars with the help of a crew of mad gods who are nothing like what you’d expect. Action-packed and hilarious! (ages 12+)

Marvel: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Shannon Hale and Dean Hale

Squirrel Girl has the tail of a squirrel and its amazing abilities for jumping, running, gliding and stocking nuts in her cheeks. But Squirrel Girl can’t let anyone know about her powers. She’s just moved to a new town where she’s trying hard to blend in, make new friends and figure out where the recent wave of crime is coming from. Squirrel Girl is awesome and super funny, and it pokes fun at Iron Man: what’s not to like? (ages 12+)

Piglettes by Clémentine Beauvais

Hakima, Mireille and Astrid have been voted winners of the Pig Pageant, that is to say ugliest girls in school. Once the initial shock of the news has subsided, what are the girls going to do about it? Mireille has the answer: they’re going to show the rest of the world that they don’t care! Follow the girls as they hop on their bikes for a hilarious road trip through France, it will put a spring in your step! (Ages 14+, Young Adult)

For more great book ideas, head over to Inis magazine, where you will find books for all ages in English and Irish. Your local library should also have a copy of this year's Inis Reading Guide, which contains over 250 quick reviews of books for babies to young adults: picturebooks, early readers, chapter books, big, fat novels, fact books and poetry.

Christmas Competition 5th and 6th Class

Back by popular demand, our bookish competition kicks off this week. Will you get all the right answers? Good luck!

Christmas Competition 3rd and 4th Class

Back by popular demand, our bookish competition kicks off this week. Will you get all the right answers? Good luck!

Christmas Competition! 1st and 2nd Class

Back by popular demand, our bookish competition kicks off this week. Will you get all the right answers? Good luck!

Look at me, reading a grown-up book!

There is a life beyond kids' books. Apparently.

Once in a while, I venture out of the kids’ section of the bookshop or library and find myself in the grown-up aisles. Usually this happens when I’m on the look-out for the latest title from Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Coe, David Mitchell or ArtoPaasilina, but occasionally I end up with books that I haven’t looked for at all and didn’t even know existed. Such was the case with Jo Baker’s Longbourn, a hand-me-down from a friend who has recently been converted to the joys of tidying and did a clearout of her shelves.

I am a long-time fan of Jane Austen’s, whose books I have read and re-read a respectable number of times (which is quite a rare occurrence for me). Why, I even wrote a thesis on Presentation and Representation of the Body in Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion and Sanditon! A clear favourite, as for a lot of people, is P&P which I have read enough times to feel like I could quote the dialogues verbatim (but I can’t really), which I’ve seen adapted numerous times on TV and on stage, and of which I have read a handful of spin-offs. Among the latter, I would heartily recommend Natasha Farrant’s Lydia, the Wild Girl of Pride and Prejudice: a brilliant, brilliant take on the original that gives Wickham a break and Lydia a chance, and is a great teen novel in its own right.

But back to Longbourn. Longbourn is the Upstairs Downstairs version of P&P, with a main focus on Downstairs, as we follow Sarah the maid in her interactions with her peers, her immediate superiors (Mrs Hill) and her ‘betters’. With Sarah we scrub, we brush, we polish. We scatter tea leaves to help sweep up the dust, we trim bonnets and wash Mrs Gardiner’s kids’ stinky nappies. We trek through the muddy lanes of Meryton, avoiding dodgy militiamen and trundling carriages. Young Polly’s less-than-thorough approach to most jobs quickly irritates a reader who is wholly on conscientious (but not all-accepting) Sarah’s side; or at least until we find out Polly is only twelve and way too young by modern standards to be doing most of the work that is her lot.

Baker has done her research very well and wears it very lightly and yet it’s in plain sight. The craftsmanship of Sarah and her colleagues as they go through their unforgiving chores is fascinating and, perversely, a joy to behold. The dirtier, the better. Suddenly, the likes of Elizabeth and Jane appear much more alive and human now that we know how their soiled linen is washed and boiled be it as part of the dreaded weekly washday or following their ‘monthlies’.

Who do you think curled that hair and laundered that frock?

And yet, at the same time, they remain figures at the periphery of Sarah’s life and story. The Bennets are, ironically, enormously absent, even though their requests and needs dictate what goes on downstairs. Shadows and shadow-puppet masters at the same time, the family cannot claim Longbourn as their own and the novel is not Pride and Prejudice. Cleverly, the original gives Baker’s book its tempo and an initial framework, but not its plot. All the events that readers of Austen know are only relayed in so far as they impact on the maids and cook and footman, all the social engagements becoming another chore on an infinite to-do list, the balls equating to somebody waiting half the night in the cold by the carriage… Darcy’s declaration is a non-event, it only features in as much as Sarah opens the Collins’ door to him on the fateful day where he makes a complete idiot of himself. But she’s not in the room to see it and nothing transpires below stairs.

As Baker puts it in her afterword, ‘where the two books overlap, the events of this novel are mapped directly onto Jane Austen’s. When a meal is served in Pride and Prejudice, it has been prepared in Longbourn.’

'When a meal is served in Pride and Prejudice, it has been prepared in Longbourn.’

Not all Austen fans will be charmed by Baker’s take as it will be seen as ‘tinkering’ with beloved characters. She adds nothing that isn’t already there in so far as the Upstairs are concerned, but she digs deeper behind the scenes and pushes some traits, sometimes to the extreme. Lizzie isn’t all that nice and charming when dealing with people are not on her social radar (‘Oh! Smith! You mean the footman! (…) You called him Mr Smith, that’s why I misunderstood you; I thought you meant someone of my acquaintance. I thought you meant a gentleman.’) And as for Wickham, suffice it to say that he definitely does not get a break here.

Baker’s prose is masterful and so self-assured that it is hard to believe this is her début. Just as she’s not afraid to unpick the fabric of P&P, she boldly goes at the fabric of language, often playing with nominal sentences that, despite their lack of verbs, are hugely dramatic and bombard the reader’s senses. When Sarah and Darcy finally come face to face (not by the Pemberley pond, not in a bathroom, but in a perfectly respectable drawing-room scene), in the closing pages of the novel, here is what we can read: ‘Sarah risked a look at his big handsome face, the meat of him: the sheen of cheekbone and nose, the gloss of eyes, the smooth rubbery flesh of his shaved lip. He was descended from a race of giants; he must be.’

‘The meat of him’!

This is a rich, daring, vivid and, yes, meaty, reimagining that more than stands on its own two legs and has a lot to say about the horrors and joys of work, the place and consideration of women and girls, the passing of time, the madness of war, and the importance of making a place your own, be it Pemberley or indeed Longbourn.

Highly recommended!

All Aboard, a Baby Book Club about things that go

We were all about cars and things that go last week at Baby Book Club, as we read Christophe Merlin's The Garage. We followed Mr Bear as he looked for his fellow mechanics to help him fix his car. Thankfully, we had plenty of assistants in the room. Armed with cardboard tools and plastic cars, they did a great job screwing, hammering and tinkering generally. And then there was the driving!
We enjoyed pulling the flaps, guessing what might be hidden behind them and laughing at what we sometimes found (what was that pair of pink knickers doing in the engine??).
There was also a lot of sharing going on (well done, team) and problem solving as some of us decided to drive in tunnels and explore the dark space Under the Table.
Our craft this time involved drawing with cars. We taped markers to the back of our motors and wheeled them around the paper, adding houses and trees along our 'roads' to make them more scenic.

As promised, here are the links to the songs and videos!

The Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang song!

Drive My Car by the Beatles

For an action-packed day at ‘Digger School’, watch Here Comes A Digger

See you all next time!

Can you guess the book? A game and a competition!

Inspired by the National Book Tokens' Hidden Books Game, the kids and myself have come up with a kids' books (and characters) alternative. It's completely homemade, low-tech and you won't win a year's supply of books if you can crack it. But can you?

There are 12 childhood characters and/or books to find, from picturebooks to novels via manga and all are favourites in our house. Pics of close-ups below.

Do share and let me know how you got on at juliette[AT]juliettesaumande[DOT]com and be in with a chance to win a book or two!

You have until Friday 8 December

Have fun!

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7) & (8)

(ok, this is a tricky one as there are in fact 2 sets of clues rolled into one picture:

a) bird and feline on the bottom sign go together

b) the other 6 signs go together)

(9)

(10)

(11)

(12)