This week, with its mixed offerings of weather has been a perfect one for the allotment and garden, except that the rain has had a bad effect on my tomatoes meaning lots of green tomato chutney was planned until I found a recipe for green tomato jam – I’ll let you know the outcome! However this is not entirely unrelated to books and my weekly reading – bear with me – for as well as gardening and allotmenting I have been studying, again related to reading and unsurprisingly e

Many moons ago we looked at Patricia Borlenghi’s Bloomsbury Nursery Treasury, published in 2011. That was a retelling of a variety of favourite stories, and now, having founded her own imprint for children – Pudding Press – she has published another retelling of a tale: The Necklace, which this time steps aside from the well-known stories and brings a nineteenth-century fairy tale back to a modern audience, re-written for twenty-first century KS2 readers. Adapted from The Nec