I could tell by the cover that Backyard was going to be a gorgeous book, so I was delighted when Walker Books sent us a copy for review. This one is an exploration of the sorts of things you might find in a backyard at dusk. The illustrations are absolutely beautiful, and the words are lyrical and read like poetry (but not in...
This weekend just gone was four weeks until the Canberra Writers Festival, and I've been pulling together a pre-festival reading stack. I'm always a bit torn before festivals and other events, about whether I want to read ahead of the event, or wait until I have heard the author speak, which gets me excited about the book, and read it with the extra...
One of my favourite picture books this year has been Some Girls by Nelly Thomas and illustrated by Sarah Dunk - this was one of the kids' books that made it into the book stack I talked about in my first post on the Living Arts Canberra website. I think I first saw this one on Instagram, and as soon as I saw...
Hello! Here we are over halfway through the year, so I thought it was a good time to check in with how I'm doing with the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge! First, a little reminder of what the challenge is about. The Read Harder Challenge is an annual reading challenge hosted by Book Riot. The challenge encourages participants to do exactly what it...
I have some book stack news to share today! While I'll still be sharing regular stacks here, each month I'm also going to be posting about some of my favourite books over on the Living Arts Canberra website! Living Arts Canberra is a new Canberra-based, not for profit arts media company, and I was thrilled to be asked to contribute to their...
I have another beautiful picture book from Walker Books to share today - Waves. This one is written by Donna Rawlins and illustrated by Heather Potter and Mark Jackson. This book tells the stories of some of the children who have migrated by sea to Australia over tens of thousands of years. In all we get 15 stories from different periods of migration,...
I'm back today with another picture book review! We love reading picture books so much, and I'm actually hoping to start sharing them here more regularly - I'm aiming for a weekly post (probably each Tuesday) on a favourite book (or maybe two) from the week. I have been sent a few picture books by publishers, so some of my posts will be...
I loved A.J. Betts' novel Zac and Mia when I read it earlier this year, and I was super excited to see she had a new dystopian YA book coming out in July. I was really lucky to have a copy of Hive sent to me by Pan Macmillian, and I've hardly stopped thinking about it since I finished last week! Hive introduces...
One of the areas of my reading life I'm trying to do better at this year is reading more short form works. I have a bunch of short story collections, and anthologies of short stories, poetry, etc, but for some reason I rarely reach for them when I'm picking out my next read, almost always grabbing the next novel on my pile instead....
Just popping in quickly today to share my July 'to be read' stack. Again this month I have a pretty good mix of books for review, one from from the library, our July book club read and books recommended by friends. A couple of these you might recognise if you read my post last week about books I'm looking forward to - Hive...
