Category Archives: Authors

A Slip in Thyme – brief notes on Edward Eager’s writing

Edward Eager’s (1911 -  1964) quartet of books for children about time are strange and uneven. So far, I’ve not been able to find out much more about Eager than Wikipedia mentions but I might be looking in the wrong … Continue reading

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A Grimm updating – Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels

Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels is a remade fairy tale which explores and updates the Snow White and Rose Red fairy tale. In the Brothers’ Grimm tale, Snow White and Rose Red, daughters of a widow, look after a bear during … Continue reading

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A portrait of young ladies – Michelle Zink’s Prophecy of the Sisters

Michelle Zink‘s debut novel, Prophecy of the Sisters, is an intriguing debut which certainly promises a lot for the rest of the series. I picked this up as a curiosity to see what it was like and found that I … Continue reading

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Who are you? – Julie Hearn’s Rowan the Strange

Julie Hearn‘s Rowan the Strange is, at once,  a fairy tale and also a riff of One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or, perhaps, the Bell Jar.It continues her exporation through questions of identity that she has explored in books … Continue reading

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Unstable castles and possible worlds

The final day of the DWJ conference saw a great paper from Jenni Tyynela which applied David Lewis‘s theory of modal worlds applied to the worlds of Chrestomanci. She explored the idea of them questioning possibility and determinism and how … Continue reading

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Diana Wynne Jones writes for smart people

Day one of the Diana Wynne Jones conference, held at the University of West England at Bristol, had two papers and the first keynote speech given by Nicholas Tucker, who grew up with the DWJ’s family. Deborah Kaplan presented a … Continue reading

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Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels…

The Observer has a piece on Margo Lanagan‘s new novel, Tender Morsels, which is outraged at sexual scenes in the book. Lanagan is a writer who demands the reader pays attention and is fiercely “in your face” and up fornt … Continue reading

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Questioning the world – Mirrorstorm by Mike Wilks

Mike Wilks‘ new book, Mirrorstorm, is  the second in his Mirrorscape trilogy and escapes the sluggishness normally associated with middle books.  It takes the argument of Mirrorworld, and further develops it the ideas in it. What began as an excursion … Continue reading

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Philip Pullman is Inside, Outide, Elsewhere at Place and Space

Last weekend was spent at the Place and Space conference at Keble College. Philip Pullman gave the key note speech, Inside, Outside, Elsewhere, on Friday afternoon where he talked about the notion of the Borderland and reading. He defined the … Continue reading

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Paper presented on Neil Gaiman at CLYCC

I gave a paper recently at the Children’s Literature and Youth Culture Colloquium that Maria Cecire runs at the University of Oxford. It was called Dreaming the World: Mirror worlds in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Mirrormask. I’ve attached the paper … Continue reading

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