Book Review: The Carrefour Curse

From the publisher: The Addams Family meets The Westing Game in this exhilarating mystery about a modern magical dynasty trapped in the ruins of their once-grand, now-crumbling ancestral home.Twelve-year-old Garnet regrets that she doesn’t know her family. Her mother has done her best to keep it that way, living far from the rest of the magical Carrefour clan […]

Book Review: The Time Tider

From the publisher: Mara and her dad have lived in their van for as long as she can remember. Whatever her father does to scrape a living has kept them constantly moving and Mara has never questioned it. That is until she uncovers a collection of notes addressed to ‘the Tider’, an individual responsible for […]

Happy New Year & Classic Irish Childrens Fiction

Happy New Year! Yes, another year has arrived! Although I am not happy with how quickly 2022 came and left us (seriously, how did that happen so fast?), I am pleased with how my writing year went. My second book was published, I gave writing classes for kids, I did school visits, I was interviewed […]

Book Review: Emba Oak & the Terrible Tomorrows

Emba lives in a cave with Fred, the Wise Hermit of Witcherly Wood. Fred is the guardian and interpreter of the Tome of Terrible Tomorrows, a book of obscure prophecies, as well as the only mother Emba has ever known.  When Emba sees a dragon that no one else does, Fred decides come clean about […]

Book Review: Sky Born

This week, TOTP and Knitted TOTP take a look as SkyBorn by Sinead O’Hart. From the blurb: The circus has seen better days, but for Bastjan it’s home. He will do anything he can to save it, even if it means participating in a death-defying new act. But when that fails to draw in the […]

Book Review: The Sleeping Stones

From the publisher: Gruff and his new friend Matylda live on a small island off the Welsh coast, where legends are beginning to stir. Islanders find themselves irresistibly drawn to the Sleeping Stones, a line of rocks like stepping stones out to sea, and Gruff and Mat soon realise they must risk everything to save […]

Book Review: Knights of the Borrowed Dark

Recently I was at an event in the Museum of Literature Ireland hosted by author Dave Rudden, so naturally I picked up a copy of his middle grade series, the Knights of the Borrowed Dark. The son of a friend of mine loved the first book in the trilogy so much he lent me his […]

Book Review: The Last Fallen Star

Riley Oh is super-excited that her sister Hattie is about to turn thirteen which means she will be fully initiated into the Gom clan, a Korean gifted clan of healing witches. Hattie will therefore be able to work her magic unsupervised as a fully fledged witch. Although Riley is only a month away from her […]

Book Review: Raggedy-Chan & Nine-Tail Fox

Raggedy-Chan, book 1 in the Chinese Heritage Tale series, is a charming, delightful, heart-warming, and imaginative story. Aunt Gracie wants to make sure her half-Chinese, half-American niece Emma knows her Chinese heritage, so she tells the story of Raggedy Chan, a Chinese Princess who travels to American to save her homeland of Kunlun. The story […]

Book Review: A Storm of Sisters

I really enjoyed A Pinch of Magic by Michelle Harrison which I read in the summer, so when I saw another in the series, I happily bought it. I didn’t realise it was book 4, but it’s a standalone adventure so it didn’t matter that I had missed books 2 and 3. This time, Betty, […]