If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! Anyone who’s been reading this site for a while knows that I regularly pass on zingy series fiction to my husband. Though his reading interests are polar opposites of mine, he’s possibly an even tougher...

Medicine might go down with the help of a spoonful of sugar, but Mary Poppins herself would surely agree that middle grade fiction is a sweet enough medicine in its own right. It’s the genre I reach for whenever I’m feeling a little down or disillusioned; my fictional heart home. It’s a genre where it’s okay to be cheerful and upbeat,...

  The other night I attended a Christmas dinner for fourteen people, only a handful of whom actually knew each other. We all know how these events play out: awkward introductions where people try to define their lives as concisely as possible so as not to bore the others, and yet verbosely enough that they might find something, anything in common so that...

Sally Harris’s just-released Diary of a Penguin-napper owes its existence to an urban legend–one that has stuck in Sally’s mind for years. Though she can’t remember who first told her the tall tale about a boy stealing a penguin from a zoo using nothing but a backpack, it’s an idea she was taken with from the very beginning. “The more I thought...

“Fairy tales are life lessons disguised with colourful characters and situations,” preaches Mrs Peters to her class of apathetic pre-teens, among them our twin protagonists, swotty Alex and snoozy layabout Conner. After this valiant bit of Aesopian moralising, Peters goes on to bemoan the loss of the original Hans Christian Anderson and Brothers...