 |
The Very Hungry Caterpillar - Eric Carle
by emmad5689
My youngest daughter absolutely loves books and when we were looking what to buy her for Christmas I came across this book when I was flicking through the Amazon site and remembering I loved it when I was younger I bought it for her.
The book can be bought from all good book shops and online on sites such as Amazon, the RRP ... of the book is £6.99 which is about a normal price for this type of book.
The front cover of the book is a white background with a bright green caterpillar on the front, the green is made up of lots of different shades and he has a bright red face. The book is written by Eric Carle and is published by Puffin books.
The story follows a small caterpillar who hatched out of a tiny little egg and is very hungry. The caterpillar starts the week on a Monday and eats just one apple, one Tuesday he eats two pears, on Wednesday he eats three plums, on Thursday he eats four strawberries and on Friday he eats five oranges. When Saturday comes the caterpillar is still hungry and so he eats his way through a banquet of a piece of chocolate cake, an ice cream, a pickle, a slice of cheese, a slice of salami, a lollipop, a piece of cherry pie, a sausage, a cupcake and a piece of watermelon and not surprisingly he ends up feeling sick. On Sunday he east through a full green leaf and the n since he was then a big fat caterpillar and he builds himself a cocoon, the book finishes with the caterpillar emerging a beautiful butterfly.
I love this book and have done since I was a child, I love the simpleness of the story but also it introduces counting and fruit names aswell as the way a butterfly is created. My eldest daughter knows this book from school and she can tell you what is going to happen on each page before you even turn the page. My youngest daughter will sit and read this book with you over and over again, when you stop reading it with her she will sit and turn the pages again picking out words that she remembers from the story herself which I love to hear from her and I love to see how much she enjoys the book.
The pictures in the book are all bright and simple and the majority of the pages don't even have a coloured background just simply a white sheet of paper with the subject of the text on it. The book is a decent size which makes it ideal to lay over mine and my daughter's knees so we can all see the pages and there is no fighting over the book. This book is really a classic in my opinion and I can see it being around for many more years to come.
Read the complete review |
 |
Young Bond: Hurricane Gold - Charlie Higson
by Jake Speed
"As the sun blazes over the Caribbean island of Lagrimas Negras, its bloodthirsty ruler is watching and waiting. Criminals come here to hide, with blood on their hands and escape on their minds. On the mainland, in the quiet town of Tres Hermanas, ex-flying ace Jack Stone leaves his son and daughter in the company of James Bond. But ... a gang of thieves lie in ambush - they want Stone`s precious safe, and will kill for its contents." Hurricane Gold is the fourth book in Charlie Higson's Young Bond series and was published in 2007. I was rather sniffy about these books at first and put off reading them for a long time but I think they are surprisingly good and certainly as entertaining as many of the post-Fleming James Bond continuation novels (many of which were pretty awful to be honest). I think the main thing that lifts them up a notch is the way that Higson increasingly seems to make them more like riffs on the Fleming series and foreshadows the traits and future life of the character. Hurricane Gold riffs on everything from Dr No to Diamonds Are Forever to You Only Live Twice but also manages to have enough creativity and story to be a decent book in its own right. Maybe Hurricane Gold moves close to parody but then that's not likely to be a huge problem for younger readers who have never read anything by Ian Fleming.
To tie in with the Fleming series, these books are set in the 1930s. James Bond is a teenager and a pupil at Eton but he's already had more than his share of adventures and displayed the recklessness, determination and courage that will be so essential to him as an adult. Higson is increasingly holding up a mirror to the character James Bond will become and this element to Hurricane Gold is nicely done at times. What is the plot of Hurricane Gold? Bond is recuperating from his last adventure (Double or Die) and allowed a leave of absence from Eton to join his anthropologist aunt and guardian Charmian in Mexico. Charmian is visiting no lesser site than the ruined Mayan city of Palenque. I wish I'd had an aunt who got me off school and whisked me away to Mexico. Anyway, Bond is left with his aunt's American pilot friend Jack Stone's children Precious and Jack Junior in the village of Tres Hermanas while Stone flies Charmian to Palenque. But the house is raided by hoodlums (led by the villainess Mrs Glass) during a storm and the hoodlums seem to be very very interested in the contents of the Stone family safe. The children hide after Bond manages to knock one of the goons out of a window but when the Stone children are kidnapped, Bond goes undercover as a member of a criminal gang to track them down.
This will lead to a chase through the jungle to the apparently mythical island of Lagrimas Negras where it is said that criminals from around the world are given safe haven. The man behind it all is the ruthless El Huracán and Bond will need all of his nous and bravery if he's going to recover what has been lost and make it out alive. The only way to get off Lagrimas Negras is a deadly maze/obstacle course known as La Avenida de la Muerte - the Avenue of Death. And what exactly was in Jack Stone's safe anyway? This is the most bizarre and exciting of the Young Bond books and benefits from an unusual and slightly macabre story that involves abandoned mines, jungles, lost cities, and a race against time to retrieve something very important. The pace here is certainly more breakneck than the other books in the series although that doesn't necessarily make Hurricane Gold the best one. While I enjoyed this I did feel that Double or Die's plot was better in that it kept you guessing and felt as if it had been thought through a lot more. With Hurricane Gold I always felt as if I knew where we were going from reading the Fleming books and Higson didn't really seem to feel obliged to pull the rug out from under me too much. The exotic locale is well used by the author though and he manages to create a decent amount of tension as the story unfolds.
The raid on the Stone residence for example is a gripping passage and is slightly reminiscent of the start of Colonel Sun (although that might have just been me). "Precious screamed. The young man snarled at her to shut up. There was just enough light coming through the window for James to see him grab the two children and drag them out of the room. James stayed put, breathing heavily. The intruders seemed to have come prepared, but with luck they wouldn't that he was here at all. James waited in the Wendy house for a full five minutes. Once he was sure that the man wasn't coming back he crept out of his hiding place and tiptoed over to the playroom door. He hardly needed to be quiet. The storm was making a fearsome racket as it buffeted the house. There was a cacophony of different sounds; crashing, hissing, roaring, squealing, rumbling." I quite here the way that Bond impersonates a Mexican pickpocket who looks rather like him in order to infiltrate the gang. Not only does this foreshadow the sort of thing Bond will do in his future line of work but it also points out something Fleming-esque that the producers of the film series (and audiences) seem to have forgotten - Bond is supposed to be darkly handsome. The Eton scenes are eschewed here (probably wisely lest Higson should flirt with being Harry Potter) and it's probably a strength of the book too that it immediately plunges Bond and the reader far away straight into another adventure.
Perhaps this one feels less credible than the previous books but this is Young James Bond not Crime and Punishment so let's not nitpick too much. The Fleming references do seem to come thick and fast in the end. There is a (junior) dose of sadism when Bond and Precious (who is the vague love interest here for our hero) must run Lagrimas Negras' lethal obstacle course the "Rat Race" - the Avenue of Death. This includes baby crocodiles, a tunnel of scorpions, giant anacondas, razor-wire, boiling hot metal plates, army ants, lethal spikes, and so on. "James Bond is staring death in the face. And he isn't about to blink." Not only is this a fun sequence (Bond must use his wits to survive) but it's a fairly good homage to some of the Fleming books. Like Dr No's strange tropical island - based on Inagua in the Bahamas - with spiders, giant squids, hundreds of crabs and a very nasty obstacle course designed for the adult secret agent Bond. And Dr Shatterhand's deadly botanical 'garden of death' in You Only Live Twice. An old Japanese castle stocked with poisonous specimens of plants and animals. Once again I enjoyed the way that Higson structured his book like the Fleming novels. Split up into sections with Fleming style chapter titles (although a few of the titles are are a bit ropey here to be honest).
Maybe some of the riffs on Fleming are a trifle indulgent but the primary audience for these stories will be unaware of them anyway and I think Higson actually does a better than expected job of gradually making you believe this teenager could actually grow up to be the very adult character in the original 1950s novels. When the Fleming mirror device does work though it's very good. I liked the first meeting between Bond and Precious here. It seems to mimic the first meeting between Bond and Tiffany Case in Fleming's Diamonds are Forever. Hurricane Gold has its flaws but it's a fast paced adventure and this quality manages to negate the derivative nature of the plot and some of the situations and make it worthwhile for younger readers and curious completists. Not the best of these books but fun anyway. At the time of writing you can buy Hurricane Gold for a few pounds.
Read the complete review |
|
|
Young Bond: Double or Die - Charlie Higson
by Jake Speed
Double or Die is the third of the five Young James Bond novels by Charlie Higson and was published in 2007. The books follow the timeline established by the Ian Fleming novels written in the 1950s so we are in the 1930s and James Bond is now fourteen and a pupil at Eton. After his exotic adventure in Blood Fever, the young Bond is about ... to be plunged into a most puzzling adventure that becomes a race against time and is played out in Blighty. In a North London cemetery, an Eton professor named Fairburn is kidnapped at gunpoint. Fairburn - a distinguished mathematician - had left Eton without warning but has sent a letter to Pritpal Nandra, one of Bond's school friends. The letter is coded and appears to make no sense but Bond and his friends begin to decipher the letter and realise that Fairburn is in very big trouble. Not only that, but there are big ramifications for James Bond and beyond. There are many more clues to be decoded and understood by Bond and his friends and some very nefarious characters to be dealt with along the way. This is a surprisingly clever third entry in the series and seems to take some of its cues from The Da Vinci Code (even playing at times like a junior version of Die Hard with a Vengeance). The book is structured like Fleming's Moonraker and has more of a real time element and I think it was thoughtful the way that Higson set the story in Britain after the foreign adventure Bond undertook in Blood Fever.
One can see that he is trying to distinguish these books from one another and not make them all the same and the puzzle solving element to Double or Die allows for some nice riffs on scenes and situations that occurred in the Fleming novels. Bond even visits a casino here, a place where he would be near legendary as an adult for his gambling skills - although his first assignment in this world involves a game of Hearts. I love the way he meets an important villain over the game of cards. Very Ian Fleming. Higson is not Martin Amis and keeps his prose relatively simple but if one is familiar with the Fleming novels then there is a hidden layer of enjoyment to be gleaned from his references to those books and also the way he presents an affectionate take on Fleming's world and style. The most difficult task the author has with this series is to make us believe both that Bond had all of these adventures as a teenager years before he joined the secret service AND that he is also the same person who grows up to be Fleming's flawed but spiffy blunt instrument. The former is the hardest to digest (rather in the fashion that, for example, it's hard to take the television series Smallville seriously because we are supposed to believe Clark Kent had countless adventures and met all of his major villains before he even became Superman) but Higson doesn't do a bad job at all. In terms of atmosphere and their relationship to the source material these are not a million miles away from something like that Young Sherlock Holmes film. You can sort of believe Holmes had some notable capers as a youngster before he became a famous consulting detective and the same is certainly true of James Bond.
You can also believe that the character in this book really does grow up to be the James Bond who has all of those famous missions in the Fleming series. Higson gives Bond an early obsession with death and mortality, something that of course would never be too far from the adult Bond's preoccupations given his dangerous line of work. One other very nice touch is having Bond bored and restless at the start of the story. Fleming had a word for this ("accidie") and it's a very Bondian trait. Colonel Sun by Kingsley Amis aside, I've found the James Bond books written after Ian Fleming's death a struggle at the best of times and you probably wouldn't have lost an awful lot if some of them didn't exist but - despite the fact his books are aimed at younger readers - Higson conveys a better understanding of the world of Ian Fleming and the character than most of his precessors ever did. In a sense, Higson has a more enviable task than John Gardner or Raymond Benson did and is given (ahem) carte blanche to buld the character from the ground up and show the traits and personality of Fleming's Bond slowly falling into place. There is even more torture and sadism again (Fleming loved torture and sadism), Bond this time forced by some baddies to drink copious amounts of gin. He swears off drinking as an adult, a decent joke as the adult Bond could probably drink Oliver Reed under the table and still have room for a nightcap.
Higson seems to have upped the violence quotient here and it's rather bloodthirsty at times, something which I'm sure younger readers will enjoy. There is a henchman who keeps losing body parts and all manner of murders and explosions. I think the mist shrouded graveyard sequence in particular is superbly done and reads like a tribute to bygone adventure novels. The period setting is definitely a plus here too. John Gardner and Raymond Benson had to present James Bond in the eighties and nineties and it's just much more charming and novel to have him in the 1930s, a decade of course that Fleming's Bond would have experienced as a school boy. One of Fleming's trademarks was his habit of inserting factual information of great depth about whatever was related to Bond's mission. So, for example, in Live and Let Die, Fleming waffles on about voodoo being the invocation of evil denizens of the Voodoo pantheon and generally sounds like he's scribbling from an encyclopedia. It was sometimes fun and sometimes felt like padding but it did enable to reader and gain a crash course in whatever Bond was embroiled in, even if it was just his dinner. Higson does this too in tribute to Fleming and so you get a lot of information about things like rudimentary computers and London's East End. Maybe some of these passages could have done with an edit.
As puzzle solving and codes are a big part of the story it's nice to see Alan Turing get a mention. The use of domestic locations is nicely done and look out for an old friend from SilverFin making an appearance here just in the nick of time. I like the way the book is split into three parts with Fleming-esque chapter titles and Bondian names abound again. You even get henchmen named Ludwig and Wolfgang. This is an enjoyable read on the whole and another nice addition to the series.
Read the complete review |
