Minor spoilers for A Wrinkle in Time. I first read this book nearly thirty years ago. It stands out in my memory as one of the few books I read at that age – perhaps eight or nine – that I actively didn’t like: I can remember trying to, and feeling it was the sort of book I ought to like, but simply not really getting it. At the time I think I dismissed as being an odd American book;…
One of Gerald Durrell’s less well-known books, I first read this myself as a child and have recently read it to my own son, aged five. It was an amazing hit – we read the whole book (95 pages) in under 24 hours – and deservedly so: it’s full of Durrell’s trade-mark charm, description and humour, with added adventure. The plot follows three children who accompany their great-uncle back to the Mezozoic era to track a pair of villains who…
We have quite a lot of children’s bibles and it’s always interesting to see what each one focuses on. This post carries out some fairly surface level analysis of how much time different children’s bibles spend on different books. First, the actual bibleWe can look at the relative size of the different books of the bible by comparing the number of chapters they have. It’s not a perfect analysis – some chapters are longer than others – but it’s good…
A guest blog by Jean Blakey. A mountain of people have asked me about the meaning behind my children’s book Cluck Cluck Duck and a smattering have given me their interpretation of the book. I love that! I love that people are trying to read something into my cheeky little story about a duck who has lost his quack. If you are wondering what I’m talking about then read on. I am Jean Blakey, a friend of Iain Mansfield…
I recently reread Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. It’s fascinating that for two books that are so similar – same author, same series, same length, similar vocabulary levels and sentence structure – there are still several features of the latter that make it a noticeable, if small, step up in difficulty. Most obviously, Chocolate Factory has 30 chapters while Elevator only has 20. As the books are the same length, chapters in Elevator…
My latest article on Conservative Home argues that families should be offered a choice between the 30 hours of free childcare or a transferable tax allowance, to enable a more genuine choice between whether they should both return to work, and to allow more parents who wish to to care for their own children. The full article is here: Iain Mansfield: To bring greater fairness to families, free childcare should be linked to the transferable tax allowance