This sweet, simple story from Marjorie Newman and award-winning Scottish illustrator Patrick Benson somehow avoids cliché while teaching one of life's oldest lessons: if you love something, you really shouldn't hold it prisoner in a tiny, handmade wooden cage.
With spare text, Newman explains how Mole finds a baby bird that has fallen out of its nest, apparently abandoned. ("Mole waited and waited, but no big bird came to help it.") He takes the tiny bird home to keep, despite his parents' warnings: "'It's my pet bird,' said Mole. 'It's not a pet bird. It's a wild bird,' said his mother."
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11524.33 | Fiction literature | 5 September 2011
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A Cupboard Full of Coats
Redolent of Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, Yvvette Edwards' bold debut is a searing story of family, jealousy, and tragic betrayal. "He just knocked, that was all, knocked at the front door and waited, like the fourteen years since the night I'd killed my mother hadn't happened at all..."
Grade 5-8 - A poetic blend of reality and myth provides a riveting tale of adventure and passion. An ancient whale ridden by a mystical man rises from the sea, the rider throwing spears that blossom like seeds into gifts of nature. One last spear "-flew across a thousand years. When it hit the earth, it did not change but waited for another hundred and fifty years to pass until it was needed." It sprouts when Kahu, a girl child, is born to the eldest grandson of the chief of the Maori in Whangara, New Zealand.
Each time he struck, he took two victims. Day after day, he waited for the first body to be discovered—a body containing all the clues the investigators needed to find the second victim, who waited...prey to a slow but certain death. The clock ticked—salvation was possible. The police were never in time.
Fred Scully waits at the arrival gate of an international airport, anxious to see his wife and seven-year-old daughter. After two years in Europe they are finally settling down. He sees a new life before them, a stable outlook, a cottage in the Irish countryside that he's renovated by hand. He's waited, sweated on this reunion. He does not like to be alone - he's that kind of man. The flight lands, the glass doors hiss open, and Scully's life begins to go down in flames.
