Halloween need not be a time for fear of fear but a time for fun in the fear. Why? How? Because there is great opportunity to be safely scared whilst having fun reading of course! Here are some brief reviews of the amazing Halloween books I have been reading in the last we - but these books are of course not just for Halloween, they can be enjoyed all year around and some may be enjoyed just as much in the daytime or even the summertime! Mrs Blackhat by Chloe and Mick Inkp

This morning I woke with a muse – why I have no idea but poetry takes us like that sometimes and so it was that on descending the stairs I found myself sitting with She is fierce. Brave, bold and beautiful poetry by women compiled by Ana Sampson and published by Macmillan. Perhaps it was the simple but stunning red cover with orange lettering which had stuck in my memory, perhaps it was the thought of what might lay on those pages, the curiosity about these brave, bold, beaut

Louise works in a museum, in a museum library full of books to be precise so does that make her biased towards the topic of books about museums? Does that mean that although this is a shared blog post she is not the best person to be sharing the writing with? Possibly but then Louise also works with children’s books. This conundrum does pose a bigger question too; does working in publishing, teaching (as Louise’s co-author Simon does), school libraries or any role that brin

The day I sat down to start writing this, a snail began a slow tour up the glass door in my kitchen. 'What's he doing here?' I mused, taking my eye off the ball for a moment. Is this a sign? I turned around, the snail had vanished. The penny dropped. Little snail was a sign for the opening of this paper. I realized that I needed to pose a question: about why I was interested in such a strange little flat-footed spirally thing; something both odd and every-day, seen in a