Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away
Cavan Scott: STAR WARS – Adventures In Wild Space – The Escape (Egmont 2016) With the end of the Clone Wars and the destruction of the Jedi Order, Emperor Palpatine has unlimited control over the galaxy. After the creation of the new system, the Empire turned its attention to the Wild Space and wanted to explore even the Unknown Territories. Here, outside the borders of the Empire, the cartographers Auric and Rhyssa Graf work with their children Milo and Lina. The children were born on their parents’ ship, the Whispering Bird, and accompanied their parents everywhere during their voyages of discovery. The family is sent by their agent to a remote and unmapped swamp-planet, but they have no idea that the shadow of the Empire lures nearer and nearer… This volume is the prequel to the six-volume series and published for World Book Day in 2016. The main characters of…
Fairy cakes
Fiona Patchett: The Usborne Children’s Book of Baking (Usborne Publishing 2006) Fiona Patchett is a children’s book writer and editor at Usborne Publishing in the UK. From cookbooks to history books, from sticker books to fairy tales, she collaborates with illustrators and designers to create eye-catching and informative books. In her free time, she likes to bake and tries different recipes for fairy cakes. Two of her children’s cookbooks have already been published: Christmas Baking for Children and The Usborne Children’s Book of Baking, which can also be read in Hungarian. I was still in high school when I saw it in a bookstore, and I really liked the beautiful cake photos. I tried a few of its recipes, but then I didn’t come across it for years, until I finally baked from it several times at last Christmas. What I liked about it was that – since it was…
Wizard from the past
Simon Farnaby: The Wizard In My Shed (Hachette Children’s Group 2020) Simon Farnaby: The Warror In My Wardrobe (Hachette Children’s Group 2021) Simon Farnaby: The Wizard and Me (Hachette Children’s Group 2022) Merdyn, the Wild, has already caused so much trouble in the Dark Ages that the people of Albion banish him to the stream of Purgatory. But the spell goes awry and Merdyn is thrown into the Stream of Time, which dumps him in 21st century Bashingford. Rose is an ordinary girl nowadays, who stands out from the rest only because she has a particularly good sense of embarrassing herself at school. Her only friend is Bubbles, the guinea pig. The two eccentrics are brought together by fate to turn the city, the world and each other’s lives upside down. However, they have no idea how good an effect they will have on each other. Caution: if you read…
Clumsy witch
Jill Murphy: The Worst Witch (first published by Allison & Bushby in 1974) Future witches study at Miss Cackle’s Academy for Witches. Outside, gloomy gray walls and towers rise to the sky, and inside there are long narrow corridors running between the staircases and the sunlight almost never gets in. The girls who study here also wear black uniforms, capes and peaked caps. Mildred Hubble is the clumsiest among them. What she is doing usually goes wrong. If she accidentally succeeds with a spell, she will cause trouble with that as well. In the novel, we can follow her adventures with her best friend Maud Spellbody and the snooty know-it-all Ethel Hallow within the enchanted walls of the school. The novel is short, but very fast-paced and exciting, despite the fact that it does not resemble today’s action-packed adventure novels but is much cuter. We don’t have to worry about…
East of the Sun, West of the Moon
Edith Pattou: North Child (first published by Harcourt Brace and Company in 2003 under the title East) Everyone knows the story: a cursed prince who takes a girl to his castle to live with him. However, the girl breaks her word, but eventually falls in love with the prince and breaks the curse. The most famous such story is the Beauty and the Beast, which many people know from Walt Disney’s movie, but this is only one of the many adaptations. The origin of the story is the Norwegian folk tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon, which is basically followed in Edith Pattou’s novel, here, too, a white bear is the cursed prince who takes Rose, a lively, inquisitive young girl, to his castle. In return, the girl’s family gets rich and her sister recovers. Rose is lonely in the palace and does not know who the…
The House with Chicken Legs
Sophie Anderson: The House with Chicken Legs (Usborne Publishing 2018) Everyone usually thinks of Baba Yaga, one of the characters of Slavic folk tales, that she is evil. She lives in a house with chicken legs surrounded by a bone fence and people go into the hut but don’t come out. In fact, Baba Yaga is the guardian of the Gate that leads to the afterlife. The dead can return to the stars through this gate. Marinka, the heroine of our story, also lives in such a house with her grandmother, who is the Guardian. However, Marinka does not want to be the next Guardian. She doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life yet, but she’s sure she wants to decide it for herself. First, she wants to make a friend, a real one who stays for more than one night, not like the dead. However, even…
Return to Nevermoor
Jessica Townsend: Hollowpox – The Hunt for Morrigan Crow (Orion Children’s Books in Hachette Children’s Group 2020) Australian author Jessica Townsend grew up in Queensland and published her first story when she was 7 years old. She later worked as a copywriter and magazine editor before becoming a full-time writer. She moved to London at the age of 22 and has lived alternately between London and Queensland for the last 10 years. Her first book, Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow, brought her worldwide fame. The first volume of the series was presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair, then won several prestigious awards and several translations were published. Morrigan Crow is a cursed child, so she is blamed for all bad things and accidents until the age of 11, when she must die. But before her destiny is fulfilled, a mysterious stranger rescues and smuggles her to Nevermoor, a wonderful…
The connecting line
Kate Allen: The Line Tender (Penguin Random House 2019) One summer day, the first great white shark arrived in Rockport. This sets off a chain of events. Lucy and her best friend Fred are working on a summer school assignment. Lucy draws very well, and Fred is interested in all things scientific. The shark reminds everyone of Lucy’s marine biologist mother, who researched sharks until one day she suddenly died. In Rockport, everyone’s life is connected to the sea. Lucy’s father is a detective, but he also dives and helps the lifeguards. After another tragedy, Lucy becomes interested in her mother’s last project and visits her old colleagues to understand the purpose and importance of the research. Lucy is the link and comfort for those close to her. The theme of the book is sad: it deals with loss, yet it is hopeful. It shows how we can overcome difficult…
The brand new heart of Sunny St. James
Ashley Herring Blake: The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James (Little, Brown & Company 2020) When Sunny St. James gets a new heart, she decides that her life will be different from this moment on. She makes a plan: 1) she will do amazing things she never dared to or cannot do before; 2) find a new best friend; and 3) she finally kisses a boy. But when she executes the first two steps of her plan, with the help of her new best friend Quinn, Sunny questions whether she really wants to kiss a boy. The situation is complicated by the return of her mother, who left her daughter with her best friend 8 years ago because she was an alcoholic. Now she also wants to start a new life. Meanwhile, Sunny starts writing songs to process what is happening inside and around her. This is a very sensitively…
The strange life of writers
Lily King: Writers & Lovers (Grove/Atlantic Inc. 2020) Many thanks to 21. Szazad Kiadó for sending me the book! Casey is 31 years old and she recently lost her mother. Until now, she has lived a nomadic life: since university, she has moved 11 times and had 17 jobs, but now, after the death of her mother, she feels truly stateless, despite returning to Massachusetts. Due to her loans, she has a debt of 73 thousand dollars and lives in a miserable sublet. She is estranged from her father, her brother lives far away, and her friends keep getting married or stop writing, just as one recovers from an illness. She writes in the morning and works as a waiter in the afternoon and evening. Her love life is in ruins, but now she has also met two men: the young Silas and the established writer Oscar, who is a…