When the review titles arrived this month, my kids called me the Book Queen and hugged the pages to their chests, eyes wide, already imagining what was inside. Book Queen? I said, I am the Queen of all the world and they laughed and told me I was right, people who buy books should rule the world. Then they curled up and devoured the stack over a weekend. Digging through the two anthologies and two short translations, we’ve had a blast deciding who are our favourite characters

Home Child, based on child migrant Pat Brown’s early life, is such a major change of pace, a poignant, heart-wrenching story by a writer so well known for her hugely successful funny rhyming books like I Need a New Bum, Melinda Szymanik wanted to know where it had sprung from. I’d received Dawn McMillan’s latest picture book, Home Child (Oratia, 2019), in the post a few weeks previously, and I was keen to have a chat with her about it. This book, based on child migrant Pat Br

For the final part of our finalist coverage of this year's NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, we have quite the treat for you: excerpts of the five Picture Book Award finalists! Here are the first few pages of each book, along with descriptions from the Book Awards Trust. Who'll be the winner? We find out on Monday, 14 August ... An uplifting story about imagination, and a rather wonderful caterpillar. It has magic and charm, evocative language and rhyme which echo

Anzac Day brings with it a fever pitch of publishing of war books for both children and adults. This has been especially true during the centenary commemorations of World War I. People are horrified by war, but also fascinated, and it is important for everybody to know some history: to understand what has happened, what is happening, and why. So we can find a solution. As Melinda Szymanik noted in her recent article, 'War! What Is It Read For?': ‘War books are an opportunity

Author Melinda Szymanik considers war books for children, how they create deeper empathy, and tells us what writers balance as they write these books. Every year, amongst the latest batch of published stories for children about superheroes, horses, dogs and cats, adventure, wizards, dragons, dinosaurs and dystopias, there are always books about war. The last three years have seen an increase in the number of such books as we commemorate the centenary of World War One, and thi