Skip to main content

Children’s books roundup – the best new picture books and novels

Wild island adventures, hungry monsters, TS Eliot’s cat – plus the best new YA novels

The remote wildness of a Scottish island blended with Celtic folklore and Hindu mythology: Jasbinder Bilan’s Aarti & the Blue Gods (Chicken House) is a gem for readers of eight-plus. Aarti lives alone with her exacting, cruel aunt, cut off from the world and her own history – until a boy washes up on the beach, and she makes an extraordinary discovery. Deftly interweaving the tangible and the numinous, this richly layered adventure confirms Bilan’s striking, original talent.

From Scavengers author Darren Simpson comes The Memory Thieves (Usborne), a tense sci-fi thriller. In the Elsewhere Sanctuary, young residents, including Cyan, submit to Dr Haven’s memory modifications to escape deep-rooted trauma – but when Cyan finds a cryptic message carved into a whale skeleton, and sees a new arrival resist the regime, he begins to rebel, too. Simpson combines fast-paced visual storytelling with a complex, thought-provoking message about coming to terms with the past.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3sREhxo

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Degrees of separation: what connects Seinfeld to Steve Bannon?

From the US sitcom to the far-right rabble rouser, we go down the rabbit hole, thanks to the arrival of Jerry’s show on Netflix Seinfeld All 180 episodes of the 90s’ most misanthropic sitcom have arrived on Netflix, but not everyone is happy. Some viewers have complained that the new transfer puts Jerry Seinfeld ’s show in a different aspect ratio: from an older square format to widescreen … yada-yada … now the picture crops out some sight gags and just seems slightly bizarro . Motion impossible: fallout It’s not the first time modern technology has caused problems. HD TVs can make even visually stunning films look like cheap soap operas, through motion smoothing – a process to reduce blurring (good for on-screen sport). But Tom Cruise was there to save the day: in a slightly awkward 2018 video , he explained how to adjust TV settings to undo this flat fiasco. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mr722c