Monthly Archives: February 2020

Jemima Small Versus the Universe

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Jemima Small Versus the Universe by Tamsin Winter

Book of the Week: 23 February 2020

Cover illustration by Usborne Publishing

Do you have a brilliant memory and love a fascinating fact? If so, you will enjoy the company of Jemima.

Jemima is clever, has a best friend called Miki, a slightly annoying dad and an extremely annoying older brother and is keen to represent her school on the popular tv quiz programme Brainiacs. She knows something is wrong when Mr Shaw, their Year 8 science teacher, says everyone is going to be weighed and measured. In public. There is no way that Jemima wants her weight displayed on the whiteboard for everyone to see, so she knocks over a tray of glass beakers as a diversion. Apart from her dad having to pay for the beakers, she thinks she has protected her privacy. However, she is called to a special meeting next morning with a few other students. A letter home says that she is ‘in the very overweight range’ and is going to be part of a healthy lifestyle programme. As some people in school already call her ‘Jemima Big’ and make snide remarks about her weight, Jemima thinks this is the final straw in destroying her self-esteem. Luckily for us, Jemima is not only clever but has a sense of humour and is prepared to fight back against being completely crushed by the insensitivity of other people.

If you enjoyed Apple and Rain by Sarah Crossan or any books by Kim Slater or Susin Nielsen, then there is an excellent chance you will love this.

The Boy in the Black Suit

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The Boy in the Black Suit by Jason Reynolds

Book of the Week: 9 February 2020

Cover images have been adapted from ones on Shutterstock.

Matt’s mother died recently and he and his dad are coping with grief in their different ways. Matt visits a local fast food restaurant to find a job and is attracted to the girl who serves him, but not so impressed by the customers or the young girl who rushes in and throws up. When the neighbourhood undertaker, Mr Ray, asks him if he wants to help out with funerals, he decides it’s preferable to the fast-food joint. Soon, he is attending funerals as helper or pall-bearer and finding a strange comfort in seeing how other people are coping with grief.

Matt is cool and streetwise, but a thoughtful and sensitive character who rejects the often macho approaches of the men around him. At first, his life appears to lurch from bad to worse until he gets involved with the people in his neighbourhood and begins to see a path back to the kind of life where he can begin to deal with grief.

Despite the themes of grief and death, this manages to be a sometimes humerous look at ordinary, and not so ordinary, life in Brooklyn, New York City.

The Kid Who Came From Space

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The Kid Who Came From Space by Ross Welford

Book of the Week: 2 February 2020

Cover illustration by Tom Clohosy Cole

When you are hurtling through space with a smelly, hairy alien, a weird kid from school and a chicken named Suzy, you might wonder what has gone wrong with your life. Ethan doesn’t have to wonder too hard, he knows it all went wrong when his twin sister went missing from the village of Kielder, where his mum and dad keep the Stargazer pub. The ensuing panic and grief on the part of the family and close-knit community are almost too much to bear, so Ethan takes a break by going for a walk to the lakeside at the invitation of Ignatius Fox-Templeton who “has a school record that you’d call ‘inconsistent’…”. It is there that they witness a gigantic splash, as if a car has plummeted into the reservoir from a great height. When they investigate the splash and the subsequent humming noise, they see that the water has an indentation as if a giant glass plate is sitting on its surface. Puzzlement changes to terror as a humanoid covered in hair with a huge nose and a tail like a cat, appears as if from nowhere and asks them to help her. Ethan links the humming noise of her spaceship with a noise he heard on the night his sister Tammy disappeared. Can this alien creature help him find his sister or has she got something to do with her disappearance?

If you have enjoyed any of Ross Welford’s other books, you are sure to like this one as it has all his usual warmth and humour. If you haven’t read any of them, you might enjoy this if you liked Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s ‘Sputnik’s Guide to Life on Earth’, although Hellyann (the owner of the invisible spaceship) is a totally different kind of alien to Sputnik.