at the risk of fan-girling over David Almond....really? why hasn't everyone read this?Mina is wickedly smart, funny and delightfully freakish. a testament to the glory of fringe-dwelling and the evils of the public school system.this book, along with Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli ought to be requir...
I LOVE THIS BOOK! Its cool, interesting and I love the way it is written and I love the little activities Mina sets. I also kinda like how not much happens in the first part, you just get to know Mina and how she thinks and feels about things. The poems Mina writes are really cool.However, I agre...
Interesting concept of a story about a young girl who sees the world differently than those around her as she struggles to fit in to the education system. I think that children who feel out of place in traditional education systems might really like Mina's story. I preferred The Evolution of Calp...
This book was created by the same author/illustrator team who created one of the books now shortlisted for this year's Greenaway Medal ("Slog's Dad"). I didn't like this book as much as their other effort, but it is interesting and unusual. The boy in this story, Blue, has recently lost his dad...
All of David Almond's books are exceptional--at least, I've read (and own) quite a few and not found anything different so far. Brilliant writing, images, ideas, depth, humanity, imagination, understanding, language, sense of place, history and what matters. It doesn't matter that his books are...
This book was fantastic. So simple but moving and the illustrations were brilliant. I don't think there is a book by David Almond i have not liked, My Name is Mina & Kit's Wilderness being my favourites. The story is very short by heart-felt and the illustrations match it perfectly. Everythin...
Setting: Keely Bay, England, a dying coastal town drowning in slack. Time: the Cold War, during which people feared the possibility of a WWIII. Set in such a turbulent period of time that would change the known world order in the West, The Fire-Eaters is a book of subtle story telling, of subtle ...
It's hard to be a cynic, much less a hatah when you have something pure like this. This may not be my favorite book, but I can't say that I didn't enjoy giving up a few hours on a Wednesday night to visit Michael's world.When I was little and told to say my prayers (by hypocritical lapsed cathol...
I opened the book just to take a peek; I was already reading another book, after all. David Almond drew me in and I dreamwalked episodes from his childhood in northeastern England with him. There isn't really a storyline in this book. The episodes come in no apparent sequence, floating into view,...
The best phrase I can think of to describe this story is somewhat paradoxical: "darkly sublime." It's so rich throughout, I don't think my words can come close to doing it justice here. My sister recommended that I read it after quoting a writing expert who said this book is a "master class" on h...
The experience of reading Clay is like being in a dream. There are recognisable objects and familiar places, but everything is twisted round, suffused with the strange, the extraordinary, the downright miraculous.David Almond is an award winning author and one of the finest writing for young adul...
Heaven Eyes, by David Almond is a novel about four orphans. The main character is Erin Law, she narrates the story. Erin lived with her Mother in paradise up until she was three. Her Mother died and she has lived in Whitegates for ten years. Whitegates is an orphanage that is a home to many child...
Young Joe Maloney does not fit. He stutters, is constantly bullied by the children of the bleak suburbanan town of Helmouth and cannot seem to stop truanting. Alone he wanders the wastelands around the nearby motorway, he sees things others do not and though his mother, raising him alone, his c...
I want to click it away, but it says For Liam Lynch, the Foundling Kid. I grit my teeth and open it. There’s an attachment. I open that as well. A video begins. The picture’s blurry. There’s a figure sitting on a chair at the center of a small poorly lit room. He’s wearing jeans and a striped shi...
I wark with Mam from hous to hous for hairdressin. I lern abowt her ladies that liv in littl shady flats & ruind houses with fotos of long gon famlys arownd them with payntings of grene & flowery sunlit plases on the walls. I sit on sofas sippin joos or nibblin a biscut or suckin a swete ...
We went quickly to our trees. The blossom was nearly gone by now. “First cut away the old dead stuff,” she said. Some of it was so old, so sapless, it could be just snapped off. Thin boughs cut easily. They tumbled down onto the grass. We sawed off the bigger boughs. We snagged our skin on thorns...