Dim's Write Stuff

I'm a bit of a junior fiction fan, a genre I believe is almost as exacting as picture books to pen. They rely on just the right tempo, vocab choice and audience engagement with the added complexity of appealing to newly independent readers. The new Riz Chester series champions all these qualities. Here is my KBR review that appeared earlier this month. Riz is a 10-year-old primary schooler with a penchant for noticing the unnoticeable. She is reticent to share this phenomenon with others even her closest friends for fear of seeming odder than she already feels. Instead, Riz records her observations in her ‘Weird Stuff Log’ with enough detail and smattering of sass to make Miss Marple grin. And grin young readers will for Riz’s abilities are about to be stretched to the limit after she notices some faulty banknotes on a shopping expedition with her mum. Suspicions are raised. Police are engaged and for Riz, doubts set in. Has she done something wrong just because she has identified...

To throw the reader immediately into the action is a writing pre-requisite we authors often hear or try to adhere to. Doing so creates an immediacy that snags attention in the snap of just a few lines. Accomplished children’s writer of historical fiction, Pamela Rushby, achieves all this and more in each and every one of her novels. The Mud Puddlers is no exception. Oozing with atmosphere, animated characters and a fascinating glimpse into London’s not so distant history, this middle grade fiction beckons kids to believe in the possibility of time slipping. Twelve-year-old Nina is relegated to spend a year in London while her parents head to Antarctica on a research mission. Although she and Aunt Bee are close, Nina succumbs to a state of insubordinate gloom. Nothing Aunt Bee does or says can shake Nina out of her blue funk resentment at being left behind. Not even the adventure of living on her aunt’s converted barge on the river Thames is enough to enthuse. Nor the fact that her a...