Penny Pollard's Diary

Author	Christos Tsiolkas
ISBN	1741753597

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own.

This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the slap.

In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye...

Author

Joanne Harris

A timeless novel of a straitlaced village's awakening to joy and sensuality - every page offers a description of chocolate to melt in the mouths of chocoholics, francophiles, armchair gourmets, cookbook readers, and lovers of passion everywhere.

Illuminating Peter Mayle's South of France...

Author	May Gibbs
ISBN	0207170614

Not, you never said that Snugglepot and Cuddlepie was a sex-and-violence-infused philosophically-motivated Scandinavian-themed retelling of Genesis. WHY DID YOU LIE TO ME?
______________________

[Later the same day]



Well, I'm definitely building...

Author	Armistead Maupin
ISBN	0552998761

Tales of the City is not great literature. That's not what Maupin's aiming for. In what is the first and best book in a six-part series constructed from a serial column in the San Francisco Chronicle, Tales of the City is smart, guilty entertainment at its best. It's a soap opera. But like, say, Six Feet...

Author	Lynley Dodd
ISBN	0670913502

Following the resounding success of my Locus Quest, I faced a dilemma: which reading list to follow it up with? Variety is the spice of life, so I’ve decided to diversify and pursue six different lists simultaneously. This book falls into my BEDTIME STORIES list.

I have a little boy...

Author	Philip Pullman
ISBN	1448194512

It is twenty years since the events of La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One unfolded and saw the baby Lyra Belacqua begin her life-changing journey.

It is seven years since readers left Lyra and the love of her young life, Will Parry, on a park bench in Oxford's Botanic Gardens at the end...

Author	Camilla Läckberg
ISBN	1605981737

Hot on the heels of her phenomenal American debut, The Ice Princess, Camilla Läckberg brings readers back to the quiet, isolated fishing village in Sweden where dangerous secrets lie just beneath the community’s tranquil surface.

During an unusually hot July, detective Patrik Hedstrom...

Author	Ruth Park
ISBN	1903015111

I can't believe how long it took me to get through this book. It's only 200 pages and I *loved* it as a kid. But rereading it as an adult in a world where YA is a thing? This is...odd.

Admittedly, this book is older than I am - it was published in 1980 - and it's essentially a YA book that was written in an...

Author	Jeannie Baker
ISBN	0688063632

“My father says there has been a forest here for over a hundred million years,” Jeannie Baker's young protagonist tells us, and we follow him on a visit to this tropical rain forest in North Queensland, Australia.

We walk with him among the ancient trees as he pretends it is a time long ago,...

Author	Paul Jennings
ISBN	0140370994

Use a little caution when reading this book...

I had to give it 4 stars because I was so impressed with how well it captured my sons attention. This book consists of 8 short stories that are divided up into little chapters, so it's ideal for kids with a short attention span.

I would definetly...

Author	Jenny Wagner
ISBN	0140503064

Note: I didn't read this; I saw it on "Sammy's Story Shop."

This story is appalling! Rose, an old woman, and John Brown, her dog, live together happily, until one day the Midnight Cat begins lurking around the house. Rose likes the cat and makes overtures towards it, but John Brown feels threatened...

Author	Pamela Allen
ISBN	0207172854

When reading this to a small group of children, some of them enjoyed this, others thought it just silly and a couple thought it to be on the lame side. So a very mixed reaction.


Those that liked it got a kick out of Mr Archimedes trying to figure out what was happening with the bath water. One child...

Author	Nadia Wheatley
ISBN	0916291545

.

I have just spent a delightful forty-five minutes reading the children’s book “My Place”. Winner of many awards in its home continent of Australia, it is fully worthy of all of them. What a joy and pleasure it was!

The book spans two centuries, from 1788 to 1988, and covers the...

Author	Gillian Cross
ISBN	0192753746

...and by Demon Cross really means Mean and Scary. There are no actual demonic entities, and no souls are eternally damned in the making of this book.

In fact, it isn't even very scary -- rather unrealistically so, given the premise. I mean, imagine you are little kid at a new school. Your new foster...

Author	Alexei Sayle
ISBN	0340919582

Alexei knew he was doomed to be different the day he was taken to see Sergei Eisentein's Alexander Nevsky instead of Walt Disney's Bambi. Born on the day that egg rationing came to an end, Alexei grew up with his parents and the Soviet Weekly. Each year they holidayed in Eastern Europe, where they were shown...

Author	Alison Lester
ISBN	0395669537

This isn't so much a story as a series of imaginative scenarios: children playing, creating worlds in their collective imaginations, turning bunk beds into tents and fishbowls into the ocean. The corresponding text consists of a beautifully-worded, poetic ode to the scene they've created through...

Author	Max Barry
ISBN	1400079373

Stephen Jones is a shiny new hire at Zephyr Holdings. From the outside, Zephyr is just another bland corporate monolith, but behind its glass doors business is far from usual: the beautiful receptionist is paid twice as much as anybody else to do nothing, the sales reps use self help books as manuals,...

Author	Alison Lester
ISBN	1929132735

This has given me itchy feet - there is nothing like Australia for travel, it's a must do activity ... over a long period of time ... with the family ... just like Grace in Are We There Yet?

Grace and her family hitch up their pop up camper trailer and head off, literally around Australia. Alison Lester...

Author	Mem Fox
ISBN	0152000763

Oh, Mem Fox. I'm really not sure about the message this book sends to children. I *think* it is supposed to be that trying is more important than succeeding and that your parents will love you even if you fail. What it actually says is that working mothers ignore and neglect their children and that the only...

Author	Alex Garland
ISBN	1573221090

The Tesseract by Alex Garland is a novel that lets the reader wonder at his own insignificance. It is a theme that's already been implanted there, in the modern reader’s sophisticated brain, by Voltaire, and made new again by this generation’s collective and personal psyche, which is quite enormous/ambitious...