Book in Every Stocking - Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door by Ross Montgomery recommended by Katherine Rundell

It's back! our annual festive campaign to persuade Santa to put a book in every stocking! Press here to read 2013 suggestions, and here for 2012's! We do this by aiding him (you know he is rather busy so keeping up with the publishing industry is tricky!) by asking authors, editors, readers and all round book lovers to write to the man in red and suggest good stocking filler book. Over the weeks approaching Christmas we have many cracking suggestions, but to kick us off we have one by the lovely Katherine Rundell! 

Today's Book in Every Stocking suggestion comes from Katherine Rundell. We at Space on the Bookshelf we are great fans of Katherine Rundell  and feel very privileged to have featured her on the blog several times, Press Here to read our 3D review of Rooftoppers, which then went on to win the 2014 Blue Peter Book Award. 

Dear Santa,

I am writing to recommend a book that I think you, as a man with an unusual job, an understanding of the fragility of the space-time continuum and a love of travel, will adore. It's for 9-12 year olds, and is called Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door. It's the debut novel of Ross Montgomery.

There are stories that make sense, and a few stories that do not (looking at you, Cinderella. Shoe size is not a valid criteria for forging long-term relationships) - and there are stories that make a totally different kind of sense from that which you had expected. 'Alex' falls into the third category. To describe it without plot spoilers is difficult - but it's about the son of a famously failed explorer, on an adventure to the Forbidden Lands, in the company of a talking dog. There is survival, and real fear, and there is a secret to be discovered. If the Coen bothers wrote children's fiction, it might be like this.

From the very first page, the book flies. 'The world's biggest dog was a Great Dane called Gibson, who was 107cm tall, or 42 inches, which is about as big as a 42-inch television screen.' It's like a less sly, more mad Roald Dahl novel. There are chapters that will give a child the nearest possible approximation to the experience of being slightly drunk that they can legally access. There are bits, too, that will make you cry. If you are anything like me - and, Santa, you have given me no reason to think you are not - you will find Alex, The Dog and the Unopenable Door a book to cheer for. It is beautiful, and clever, and warmly, wittily insane.

Yours,


Katherine Rundell

Spreading Festive Book-Cheer - Robin Steven tells us why she supports the Blackwell's Oxford Giving Tree

Why I Support The Blackwell’s Oxford Giving Tree

Christmas, for me, is about trying to show my appreciation of the people who make my life wonderful. I love giving gifts to friends and family because it’s a small way of telling them how much I’m glad of them – and I also think that Christmas is a good time to look further than the people in my own life, to recognise how lucky I am to have everything that I do.

As an author who also works for a children’s publisher, my whole life revolves around books. If I wasn’t literate I’d be a very different, and much less happy, person. Reading has given me so much, and I think it’s important for me to acknowledge that and try to pass on that gift to others.

That’s why I was so glad to have been asked by Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford to help launch their Giving Tree charity scheme for 2014 (Press here for more information), along with fellow authors Jo Cotterill, Susie Day and Sally Nicholls. The Giving Tree is a drive that Blackwell’s has run for the past three years – in partnership with The Children’s Society, it allows shoppers to buy books for disadvantaged children who would not otherwise receive them this Christmas.

It is very sad that a scheme like this is necessary, but it absolutely is. The facts are stark and deeply upsetting. The number of children living in poverty has risen sharply since the beginning of the recession. It’s now approximately 27% of all children in the UK – a quarter of all British children live in families who, through no fault of their own, struggle to feed them and keep them warm and dry. In those circumstances, it’s hard to think beyond necessities. It’s not surprising that parents choose to buy food for their children rather than books – but those children still need books just as much as anyone else.

We know that children who read at home do better in school giving children books really can help lift them out of poverty. Reading gives children the tools they need to succeed as adults. But for me there are other, less measurable advantages. Reading builds empathy and imagination. Books bring young readers happiness, interest and excitement, and they help children learn to dream. If a child goes to sleep hungry most nights, life can seem very narrow and dark. Reading about other experiences allows those children to see that there is something else to hope for.

Books give value to people’s lives, and that’s why I want to urge you to support the scheme – either by visiting the store, or by purchasing a book online by pressing here. Either method will get a book into a child’s hands.

Remember that, in being able to afford books, we are lucky beyond measure. Remember that, as libraries are threatened with closure all over the country, it is becoming more and more difficult for underprivileged people to access books. Remember what books have done for you. And please be generous this Christmas.

Review: Help your Child Love Reading; a Parent’s Guide by Alison David

At Space on the Bookshelf we believe that; all children love reading and that some children just haven’t found the right books yet. We endeavour to aid children, parents, carers and education professionals to find the right book for each child, with our reviews and articles. In short we at Space on the Bookshelf love reading and we try to share and promote that love of books. With this in mind, and knowing that each child is different, and that every home is unique, and that finding that breakthrough book and devolving a love of reading can be challenging, today we are reviewing a book which has been especially written to address these problems.

Alison David is a Consumer Research expert for Egmont UK, whose job involves talking to parents and children to find out what helps and hinders reading. Alison has used her wealth of knowledge and expertise to write ‘Help your Child Love Reading; a Parent’s Guide.’

The book spans the expanse of childhood from infancy to the teenage years, and tackles in an empathetic and non-judgemental manor the impact that modern life has on the development of children’s reading.

Within the book Alison highlights the reasons why fostering a love of reading is a more difficult a task for this generation of children than it way for us adults, and all previous generations. She also explains with the help of literacy experts and child development professionals the physical and emotional stages of children’s development and how they affect how children learn to read. These explanations are both reassuring and scary and once you’ve read them they all seem glaringly obvious, but ultimately they can help you empathize with your child and therefore make you less stressed about your child’s reading habits (whether it be them learning to read, becoming independent readers or continuing to read for pleasure in the teenage years) and help empower you to evolve a ‘reading home’ and promote reading for your family.

'...enjoy discovering new things together. There are so many books out there and they can be found in so many different places: libraries, charity shops, bookshops, on-line, in catalogues, at car boot sales, local ans school fetes.'

The book is full of interesting facts and concentrates on the trends of modern life for example: busyness and electronic devises, giving hints and pointers to assist your child and develop a continued love of reading. The book is in section, each section dedicated to a different stage of children’s development; pre-school, starting school, choosing to read (8-11 years), staying connected (12-16 years). Each section has pointers to help overcome the issues specific to the child’s age that hinder their reading development.

Many of these hints are simple fixes that no matter how simple in concept take creativity to implement; like creating time to read with your child, making books and stories magical, and encouraging your child to find books for themselves and allowing them NOT to finish if they don’t enjoy them. 

'When Louis began to read chapter books...an early favourite was Secret Agent Jack Stalwart: the Search for the Sunken Treasure:Australia' by Elizabeth Singer Hunt. This had some line drawings in it but they were few and far between. I rememberer he asked me if he could colour them in  - 'adding detail'... Anything you can do to ease the transition from picture books to chapter books is worthwhile - even if it means doing something generally frowned upon' 

This book isn’t just for families that have children who don’t embrace reading with enthusiasm and love, but can help established reading families too. I confess that when I started reading this book that I didn’t think it would help my family, as we read a lot! We have seven bulging bookcases, my ten year old daughter reads a novel and a half a week plus, picture books, graphic novels, and magazines and my eight year old son reads substantially more. However I did find that this book further assisted our family in our reading health, as it made me realise we had inadvertently fallen into bad reading habits.

Our main problem is time. My husband works long hours and often seven days a week, I work from home running a business on top of writing and doing everything thing else I need to do to keep the family running. The children’s lives are becoming more complex with increasing homework, clubs and responsibilities. All this resulted in losing the ritual of reading together and losing the time where we shared stories. As a result reading had become shoe horned into tight time slots and therefore the experience was more fraught and less enjoyable. ‘Help you child love reading’ help me diagnose the issue and other symptoms: for example we always fail when trying to read together as we start with something our lives can sustain, like reading a chapter book at bedtime, we ALWAYS lose our place or the book entirely. This realisation meant we could fix the problem, now we read short stories or poetry before bed, which can be easily finished in one sitting. This means we don’t get disheartened and stop, and has had a positive impact on the family as a whole. 

' ...grab half an hour and a cup of coffee and sit down with your child for some family reading time, each of you reading your own choice, side by side.'

Help your child love reading is much more than a parents guide. I strongly believe that every parent, grandparent, carer, childcare professional and education professional would find this book helpful, as in addition to being a great tool kit to help reading , many of its suggestions would help promote a happy home and can be utilised in many different positive ways and is not indeed exclusive to reading.

I would recommend this book to any family who hare struggling to foster a reading home, and to families of established bookworms alike.

For more hints and advice on promoting a reading family, visit Mostly Book's web-site to see how to start a Family Reading Group, Press Here.

Winner Announcement - Young People's Book Prize

The winner of the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize has been announced. It’s Eye Benders: the Science of Seeing and Believing, published by Ivy Books. Congratulations to its writer, Clive Gifford, with consultant Anil Seth.

This book makes the science of sight and vision incredibly accessible to children. Even reluctant readers will find it hard to resist opening up the fabulous front cover and interacting with the amazing illustrations. Massive amounts of fascinating information is covered in the writing, and presenting this as explanations of how each illusion works keeps the format really fresh and lively.

Groups of young people across the UK chose this book as the winner. Well done to them for all their hard work, and here’s hoping that the inspiration provided by the excellent short-list will lead to many of them pursing their interests in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.

The Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize 2014

The Royal Society has an annual prize for the book that best communicates science to children or teenagers. The shortlist has now been announced, and the power to choose the winner is now in the hands of groups of young people across the UK. 

The six fantastic books on the shortlist cover a wide range of subjects, but none of them fail in presenting accurate information in entertaining and inventive new ways.

Half of the shortlist is aimed at younger children. How Animals Live by Christiane Dorion (Templar) is beautifully illustrated by Beverley Young. It explores the diversity of habitats for different animals on our planet. Lift-the-flap Questions and Answers About Your Body by Katie Daynes (Usborne) contains over sixty flaps, and question-word headings which encourage children to really think about what they are reading.

The Usborne Big Book of Stars and Planets by Emily Bone (Usborne) has fold-out pages which allows for a huge amount of lively information to be presented.

For somewhat older readers, What Makes You YOU? by Gill Arbuthnott (A&C Black) succeeds extremely well at engagingly explaining DNA. We’ve Got your Number by Mukal Patel (Kingfisher) does similarly well with introducing many different aspects of mathematics. Eye Benders: the science of seeing and believing, by Clive Gifford with Anil Seth (Ivy Books) is filled with optical illusions and fascinating explanations of how they work, which encompasses both biology and neurology.

The winner will be announced later this month and we’ll be featuring a full review of the winning title.

A BIG Space on the Bookshelf Congratulations to the winner of The Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize 2014!

We at Space on the Bookshelf LOVED all of the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize shortlisted books this year, (to be fair we loved the longlisted one too!) Reviewing the shortlist was a pleasure [press here to read our reviews], and so we can empathise with the judges that picking a winner must have been a difficult task. 

But without further a'do we would like to congratulate all of the shortlisted authors, and ultimately say a huge CONGRATULATIONS to the winner ...

...Piers Torday for The Dark Wild! 

Star Struck by Cathy West – Challenged Reader’s – Review

To show our support for National Dyslexia Awareness week 2014, we have spent the week reviewing books written and designed especially for reluctant readers. Many of these are books which use the High-Low model: High interest age, with a lower reading age, so children who have issues reading can enjoy stories that are written for their interest age, but are accessible, as they are easier to read than other books written for the same age group.

Today we bring you a review for a series of books produced by Ransom, which use the High-Low method; the Star Struck series which are written for fourteen year old girls with a reading age of eight. The series and produced on themes that should interest teenage girls as they are all about performing arts. Each book is about a different type of performing art; ‘Star Singer’, ‘Street Theatre, ’Bollywood’ etc.

The Star Struck series written by Cathy West (who is actually two people; Anita Loughrey and Steve Rickard), are glossy and bright, and produced in a format to encourage girls to read, by splitting the book into sections, with a fact section, and a narrative based fiction section. The fact section, written by series editor Steve Rickard, is formatted with lots of bright colourful photographic images, and delivers the facts in bite-sized digestible chunks. This clever juxtaposition of imagery and facts, is inviting to challenged readers as it is not text heavy. The small nougats of facts are easier to process as they don’t need to be extracted from long passages of text.

The fiction section, which is at the back of the book, is written by Anita Loughrey, [who we are interviewing about her involvement with Star Struck; press here to read]. The story is written to reflect the subject matter of the book, and is accompanied by large full colour illustrations. The stories are written with vocabulary which is easy to read, and formatted so that the reader can read either the bulk of the text, or use the illustrations and speech bubbles within the pictures to deliver the story.

The thought and planning that have gone into the Star Struck series, really shines through, as their specially designed format is developed to make the reading experience easier and more enjoyable plus giving readers a choice of how to read the text.

When researching the series in preparation to write this post, I spoke to the Buckinghamshire Library service, to find that the Star Struck series is popular on the library bus, with many of the titles being lent to pupils at school they visit. This is testament to the quality of the design, and careful consideration of content.

The Star Struck series is a great example of the resources that are now being developed especially for challenged readers.

We have some Star Struck books to give away! Just tweet #StarStruck to @BookshelfSpace or e-mail us spaceonthebookshelf@yahoo.com with Star Struck in the subject bar.

Good Luck!