Synopsis: Andrew Matthews's vibrant and accessible retelling, coupled with expressive and funny illustrations by Tony Ross, provides a perfect introduction to this story from Shakespeare. Also included are notes on the themes within the story to prompt discussion and background to the Globe theatre.

Review: This is an excellent narrative retelling of Shakespeare’ ...

Another in the excellent ArtVenture series, this colourful book covers traditional (Flemish School) and contemporary art and artists from Rubens and Hobbema, through Martin, Nash, and Hokusai to Hockney and O'Keefe. Chinese, Iranian and American art feature; movements touched on include Cubism, Romanticism, Abstraction, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

This is an intense text, ...

Jack has been working as a chimney sweep for a kindly master in Victorian London when his father suddenly reappears to claim him. Then, while climbing in a chimney, Jack overhears a murder being planned through the wall. He is unable to prevent the murder but becomes determined to solve it. Jack becomes suspicious even of his own father, who has a strangely large sum of money on him, and is su ...

   I was immediately drawn into this practical book on stories in art by the colourful, cartoonlike nature of the front cover with its primary colours. The format and size of this ArtVenture series are immediately attractive to young readers.

Each doublepage spread features short, sharp scenarios of stories with captions underneath to help 'unpack' segments of narrative ...

Synopsis: This is a visually attractive and highly useable book, of value to teachers who have no background in Fine Art or Art History, and small enough for young hands to handle in the classroom. It looks at ways of picturing families in town and country from the 1600s up to the present.

Review: In making images of families, artists choose to depict them in particular col ...

Synopsis: Quentin Blake takes the reader on a tour of paintings, pastels, prints and drawings featuring Parisian women of the 19th and 20th centuries. In 77 pages, he organises the paintings, all selected from the Petit Palais in Paris, into broad themes, including portraiture, city and country, family, theatre, society, workplace, and idyllic.

Blake illustrates the chapter head ...

Synopsis: Pip is a blacksmith’s apprentice – but he longs to be a famous knife-fighter like his dead father. Alone in London, he meets great danger….and two odd allies. One is hairy and hungry. The other is William Shakespeare. Pip’s extraordinary adventures have begun…

 Review: ‘Bearkeeper’ is a novel set in the dir ...

This interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a very satisfying one. The overall effect is one of ethereal elegance, with a delicacy that emphasizes the gossamer-lightness of fairies and plot. This is also apparent in the pages that use colour.

 The style here has a lovely, clear and delicate use of line, with a distinct Art Nouveau feel, ...

This interpretation of The Tempest offers a profoundly satisfying reading experience. That the text is abridged has to be mentioned, but the clarity with which both action and meaning comes across is exceptional.

The influence of manga, and of Japanese culture in general, is clear throughout the book, for instance in the repeated use of elements of Katsushika Hokusai’s &l ...

This is the conclusion to Helen Dunmore's Ingo quartet. Readers who have read the first 3 in the series will not want to stop. They will need this book to find out how the saga is brought to an end. Is it worth the wait? An emphatic yes is the answer!

A synopsis would read something like this:'Sapphire, Conor and their Mer friends Faro and Elvira are ready to make the Crossing o ...