Favourite Middle Grade Children's Book Reads 2015 Age 9+ Post Two
This is my second post sharing my top 10 favourite Middle Grade Reads this year. It was really hard to shorten the list; this is a very strong age group in 2015. Please check out the first post. Have a really good Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Caleb Krisp - Anyone But Ivy Pocket - Published by Bloomsbury Children's (9 April 2015)
Ivy Pocket is a twelve-year-old maid of no importance, with a very lofty opinion of herself. Dumped in Paris by the Countess Carbunkle, who would rather run away to South America than continue in Ivy's companionship, our young heroine (of sorts) finds herself with no money and no home to go to ... until she is summoned to the bedside of the dying Duchess of Trinity.
For the princely sum of £500 (enough to buy a carriage, and possibly a monkey), Ivy agrees to courier the Duchess's most precious possession - the Clock Diamond - to England, and to put it around the neck of the revolting Matilda Butterfield on her twelfth birthday. It's not long before Ivy finds herself at the heart of a conspiracy involving mischief, mayhem and murder.
Illustrated in humorous gothic detail by John Kelly, Anyone But Ivy Pocket is just the beginning of one girl's deadly comic journey to discover who she really is ...
In The Marvels, Selznick crafts another remarkable artistic and bookmaking achievement that weaves together two seemingly unrelated stories-one in words, the other in pictures-with spellbinding synergy. The illustrated story begins in 1766 with Billy Marvel, the lone survivor of a shipwreck, and charts the adventures of his family of actors over five generations. The prose story opens in 1990 and follows Joseph, who has run away from school to an estranged uncle's puzzling house in London, where he, along with the reader, must piece together many mysteries. Filled with mystery, vibrant characters, surprise twists, and heart-rending beauty, and featuring Selznick's most arresting art to date, The Marvels is a moving tribute to the power of story.
Garth Jennings - The Deadly 7 - Published by Macmillan Children's Books (15 Jan. 2015)
Who needs friends when you've got MONSTERS?
Everything was happening so fast and it was all so . . . mad. It was as if someone had taken reality, made it into a jigsaw, thrown the jigsaw on to the floor and then said, "Now, hurry up and put it all together!" as they danced all over the jigsaw pieces in a clown suit, blowing a trumpet.
When Nelson's beloved big sister goes missing on a school trip, Nelson is devastated - he's not that good at making friends and his sister is the only person he can talk to. His parents join the search party and leave Nelson in the care of his mad uncle Pogo. Uncle Pogo is the caretaker of St Paul's Cathedral and it is here that Nelson stumbles across a machine, invented by Christopher Wren and buried for hundreds of years. Designed to extract the 7 deadly sins, the machine had a fault - once extracted, the sins became living, breathing monsters who would then follow the sinner around for eternity (unless they ate him first, in the case of the particularly sinful). Nelson accidentally extracts 7 deadly monsters from his own little soul. Ugly, cantankerous, smelly and often the cause of much embarrassment, Nelson's monsters are the last thing he needed in his life, but at least they're fairly harmless (he's a pretty good kid, on the whole). When he learns of their individual powers he realises the monsters can be put to good use, and together Nelson and the Deadly 7 set out on a quest across the globe to find and rescue his big sister. Somewhere along the way, Nelson realises that he finally has friends, even if they are smelly, lazy friends who like smashing stuff up.
What would YOU do... if the whole world just stopped?
Yes the WHOLE WORLD.
Birds in the air. Planes in the sky. And every single person on the planet - except you!
Because that's what keeps happening to ten-year-old Hamish Ellerby.
And it's being caused by The WorldStoppers and their terrifying friends The Terribles! They have a PLAN! They want to take our world for their own . . . Oh, and they hate children. Especially if you're a child who knows about them. Hang on - You know now, don't you? Oh dear.
Can Hamish save us from The WorldStoppers? Only time will tell!
Yes the WHOLE WORLD.
Birds in the air. Planes in the sky. And every single person on the planet - except you!
Because that's what keeps happening to ten-year-old Hamish Ellerby.
And it's being caused by The WorldStoppers and their terrifying friends The Terribles! They have a PLAN! They want to take our world for their own . . . Oh, and they hate children. Especially if you're a child who knows about them. Hang on - You know now, don't you? Oh dear.
Can Hamish save us from The WorldStoppers? Only time will tell!
Chris Riddell - Goth Girl and the Wuthering Fright - Published by Macmillan Children's Books (24 Sept. 2015)
People are flocking to Ghastly-Gorm Hall from far and wide to compete in Lord Goth's Literary Dog Show. The esteemed judges are in place and the contestants are all ready to win. Sir Walter Splott is preparing his Lanarkshire Lurcher, Plain Austen is preening her Hampshire Hound and Homily Dickinson and her Yankee Poodle are raring to go. But there's something strange going on at Ghastly-Gorm - mysterious footprints, howls in the night and some suspiciously chewed shoes. Can Ada, the Attic Club and their new friends the Vicarage sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne) work out what's going on before the next full moon?
Goth Girl and The Wuthering Fright is the third beautifully illustrated book in the Goth Girl series by Chris Riddell, sequel to Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse and Goth Girl and the Fete Worse Than Death.
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