Adventures on seas
Matilda Woods: The Girl, the Cat and the Navigator (Scholastic 2018) Maria Kuzniar: The Ship of Shadows (Puffin Books – Penguin Random House 2020) There are those who love it, there are those who are afraid of it, but everyone finds the sea interesting. In these two books, the sea plays a very important role and shows its different faces. Australian writer Matilda Woods debut book, The Boy, the Bird and the Coffin Maker is a beautiful tale about loss and finding family. Her second book, The Girl, the Cat and the Navigator, deals with a similarly important topic. Despite the serious subject, the atmosphere of the book is not sad but hopeful. The city of Nordlor, on the shores of one of the great fjords leading to the North Sea, is also called the Village of One Thousand Ships because, being no other building material, they build houses from…
The Moomins
Tove Jansson: Moomins on the Riviera (Drawn and Quarterly 2014) Many thanks to Nimue Kiadó for sending me the book! Tove Jansson, one of the best-known Scandinavian writers and illustrators, was born in Finland in 1914 to Swedish parents. She published her drawings and comics from the age of 15, but her first book was not published until 1945. The first version of The Moomins and the Great Flood had been put on paper in the shadow of war when she needed a tale without princes and princesses. This is how she created the lovely, surreal world of Moomin Valley with its inhabitants, who are able to see the positive side of every situation. The first comic strip appeared in the children’s section of a Finnish-Swedish newspaper in sequels between 1947 and 1948 and was mainly an adaptation of Comet in Moominland. The main series of Moomin comic strips was…
About growing up – NOT for kids
Zerocalcare: Tentacles at My Throat (Un polpo alla gola; BAO Publishing 2018) Many thanks to Nimue Kiadó for sending me the book! Zerocalcare, originally known as Michele Rech, is the most popular Italian comic artist of the last 20 years. He spent his childhood in France, later he moved to Rome. During his career as a graphic designer, he designed illustrations, posters, covers for various newspapers, but also worked in telephone customer service, at the airport, and translated hunting and fishing documentaries. His first book, The Armadillo Prophecy, has won several prestigious awards, worth 17 editions in Italy and has sold 100,000 copies and has now become a true modern classic among comics. Zerocalcare is currently writing a comic blog called zerocalcare.it, which is very popular, although it doesn’t cover the usual superhero stories, but writes on very serious topics. His comics are brutally honest and touchingly deep. Today, more…
The shadows of the forest
Amy Wilson: Shadows of Winterspell (Macmillan Children’s Books 2019) Amy Wilson graduated in creative writing and finds herself very lucky to be able to live what she really likes: writing stories. She enjoyed reading from her childhood – books were the real adventure for her. She has always loved fantasy and fairy tales, but when she read The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones, she was determined to use her words to create worlds where anything was possible. Her works have been nominated for numerous awards. Shadows of Winterspell is her fourth book. Stella lives on the edge of the forest, cut off from the world of both fairies and humans. She was raised bey her grandmother who is a ghost. And her parents are only distant memories. Her grandmother taught her everything she needed to know to take care of herself and hide from harmful creatures. But Stella…
Girls
Kinga Maksai: Mia & Maja (Cerkabella Könyvkiadó 2021) Many thanks to Cerkabella Könyvkiadó for sending me the book! Ever since Kinga Maksai learned to read as a preschooler, she has loved to immerse herself in the world of books. In addition to literature, her other great passion was the cinema – she graduated in Hungarian and film theory-film history. Now, she teaches Hungarian and media as a high school teacher. Although she has previously written film reviews and lifestyle articles for online magazines, she only started working in fiction a few years ago. Mia & Maja is her first book. With the first chapter of this book, she won the special prize of Cerkabella Könyvkiadó in 2017 in the Aranyvackor competition, and then with the novel she also won the 2019 Merítés Prize. Mia is 15 years old, just starting high school. Maja is 70 years old, a widow. Mia…
Wishtree
Katherine Applegate: Wishtree (Feiwel and Friends Book 2017) Many thanks to Maxim Könyvkiadó for sending me the book! Katherine Applegate has always loved telling stories. But the journey she took until she became a writer was not easy. She didn’t like to read as a child, she found the books boring. But this was only the case until she found the Right Book: this was the Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. Although she wrote her first own story as a child, she only published her first book in her 30s. Her first really great success was The One and Only Ivan, with which she won the Newbery Medal in 2013 and later several other awards. Her books are special because their narrators are nonhumans: animals or, in the case of the Wishtree, a tree. Red, a 216-year-old northern red oak tree. It stands on a small street, not far from…
Celtic Fairy Tales
Joseph Jacobs: Celtic Fairy Tales (first published in 1891) Many thanks to Digi-Book Kiadó for sending me the book! Many people thought that fairy tales are just stories for children, read in the evenings, featuring fairies. In fact, they include not only the legends and actions of the fairies, but also various folk heroes and fantastic events appearing in them or they explain the emergence of characteristic natural formations. In Europe, many tales have the same roots, but the specialities of different countries and people also appear in each version. I’ve already written about these tales in an earlier post – there you can also read about the publisher’s previous collection of fairy tales titled by Scottish fairy tales. The collector of this volume, Joseph Jacobs, was born in Australia and later studied in England. He was a folklorist, translator, literary critic, sociologist and historian, but best known for his…
A wolf is needed
Karah Sutton: A Wolf for a Spell (Alfred A. Knopf 2020) In addition to writing, Karah Sutton, an American/New Zealand author, is involved in marketing and has worked already with Disney, DreamWorks, Fox and Cartoon Network. A Wolf for a Spell is her first book for children and was nominated for several awards. Zima, the gray wolf, has learned since she was a kid to be afraid of people, especially witches, however, when her herd is in danger, she has to ask Baba Yaga for help. However, Baba Yaga never helps for free… But Zima has no other chance, so she goes into the deal and exchanges body with the witch. In this form, she meets the village girl Nadya, who also came to the witch for help. Zima has to realize that they don’t even differ so much from each other and they have to face a common enemy.…