Kid You Not!
We’re busy editing the first episode of the podcast, preparing the next one, and thinking up a publicity plan. Come back on Sunday 19th to listen to the first episode!
View ArticleEpisode One: The Making Of
As a little teaser in advance of the release tomorrow, we thought we’d provide you with a brief account of our experience making the first episode of Kid You Not! Given that neither of us had any...
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Episode One: Surely That’s Not A Children’s Book!
Click HERE to download Episode One of Kid You Not Podcast! (28 minutes) or listen to it on the feed player in the right sidebar –> Please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here! This week’s theme:...
View ArticleKid you not, we’re on iTunes !
And you can subscribe to our podcast by clicking here! Thanks to this clever bit of technology, the next episodes of Kid You Not will download automatically into your library. But please keep checking...
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Potter, More or Less
One minute forty-nine seconds of JK Rowling interspersed with beautiful (if slightly bobo) animation leave us with more questions than answers. The highly-anticipated Pottermore website will be an...
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Review: Artichoke Hearts, by Sita Brahmachari
Artichoke Hearts by Sita Brahmachari (Macmillan, 2011) Teenage novel. Winner of the 2011 Waterstones’s Children’s Book Prize. It’s a book about colour-mixing, clashing patterns, dogs peeing on a...
View ArticlePatrick Ness is the Somewhat Unsurprising Winner of the Carnegie Medal
Patrick Ness winning the Carnegie Medal was somewhat lost in the hype surrounding Pottermore (including on Kid You Not!). Author of the Chaos Walking trilogy, the Medal was won by the final book in the...
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Review: Before I Die, by Jenny Downham
The weekend was spent in a flood of tears. Not because of any personal crisis in my own life, but because I finally read Jenny Downham’s Before I Die – one book on my huge list of things-I-must-read....
View ArticleHarry Potter and the So-Called End
The most significant Harry-Potter-premiere-related tweet of the week was no doubt Barry Cunningham’s (@barrychicken) heart-wrenching (for the Pottermaniacal amongst us) remembrance of things past: Off...
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Review: ‘Billionaire Boy’, by David Walliams
David Walliams’s latest children’s novel is an easy-going, fun book, clearly geared to appeal to boys (and we do need boys’ books), and even more clearly designed by its publisher (Harper Collins) to...
View ArticleMickey Mouse subject? Why study children’s literature
This could be the subject of a whole book, but I’ll spare you the conceptual and definitional jargon. Here are five concise reasons why studying children’s literature is important, fascinating, and...
View ArticleWhy All The Education?
An interesting thing about children’s books – when compared to adults’ books – is the strange preoccupation people seem to have with the notion that children’s books should be educational. A child...
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Episode Two: ‘Quality and Trash’
In this episode we discuss the controversial labels of ‘trash’ and ‘quality’… Click HERE to download the episode (28 minutes), or why not find us on iTunes and subscribe? In this episode you will hear...
View ArticleiTunes trouble no more
Loyal listeners and lovely listeners-to-be, our problem with iTunes is now fixed. You can subscribe by clicking here ! Thanks a lot for your patience, Clem & Lauren
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Ideology in children’s books
‘What? Ideology? But children’s books aren’t ideological – that would be propaganda, it would be sacrilegious, it would be brainwashing!’ Literary criticism has shown us in the past century that no...
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Review: ‘Fintan Fedora the World’s Worst Explorer’, by Clive Goddard
Bedbound for a significant portion of the week, I wanted something light to take my mind off things, so I escaped to the jungle with Fintan Fedora the World’s Worst Explorer. We follow the inept...
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Reality check: the Oslo massacre and the Hunger Games
A friend and fellow PhD student is currently reading the Hunger Games trilogy, and she’s reading it compulsively, as required by the book itself. When we first heard about the terrible Oslo massacre of...
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Review: Immi, by Karin Littlewood
A heartwarming story in a great frozen land… Yes, I know, that was possibly the corniest sentence I’ve ever written. Still, that is exactly what Karin Littlewood’s delicate little picturebook Immi does...
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Review: Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson
When I was a real girl my best friend was called Cassandra… Novels about eating disorders always disconcert me, as they are so hard to get right. It is vital that the disease is portrayed sensitively,...
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Review: Angel, by L.A. Weatherly
If you’re the ‘Oh please not another supernatural romance!’ type, just close this window and go tweet/ play Angry Birds/ do something with your life instead. I’m like that sometimes, too. I think...
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