Kids' Books

 



 

 

FREE RESOURCES

in an ezine

Pivotal Public Speaking

Friday Fun Fortnightly

Thought for

the Day

Whizz Kids

Pivotal Personal Best

Pivotal Teachers

 

 

Are you a member of Pivotal Gold?

Benefits of Membership

 

Register

 

Get your free report

 

Make a book for Grandpa

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pivotal Kids Book

 

Pretty Monsters: Stories

Author:  Kelly Link

Released:   October 2, 2008

Reading Age: Young Adult

Themes:

Fantasy, Adventure, Magic, Supernatural

 

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Readers as yet unfamiliar with Link (Magic for Beginners) will be excited to discover her singular voice in this collection of nine short stories, her first book for young adults. The first entry, The Wrong Grave, immediately demonstrates her rare talents: a deadpan narration that conceals the author's metafictional sleight-of-hand (Miles had always been impulsive. I think you should know that right up front); subjects that range from absurd to mundane, all observed with equidistant irony. Miles, hoping to recover the poems he's buried with his dead girlfriend, digs up what appears to be the wrong corpse (It's a mistake anyone could make, interjects the narrator), who regains life and visits her mother, a lapsed Buddhist (Mrs. Baldwin had taken her Buddhism very seriously, once, before substitute teaching had knocked it out of her'). Other stories have more overtly magical or intertextual themes; in each, Link's peppering of her prose with random associations dislocates readers from the ordinary. With a quirky, fairytale style evocative of Neil Gaiman, the author mingles the grotesque and the ethereal to make magic on the page. Ages 12–up.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Link, who has two breathlessly received books of strange, surrealistic tales for adults under her belt, makes the leap into the YA fold with this collection of short stories (most previously published in separate anthologies) that tug at the seams of reality, sometimes gently, sometimes violently. In nearly every one of these startlingly, sometimes confoundingly original stories, Link defies expectations with such terrific turnarounds that you are left precipitously wondering not only “What’s going to happen now?” but also “Wait, what just happened?” Her conception of fantasy is so unique that when she uses words like ghost or magic, they mean something very different than they do anywhere else. Perhaps most surprisingly—and memorably— is Link’s dedicated deadpan delivery that drives home how funny she can be, no matter how dark the material gets. After gobbling up a group of campers, a monster with a self-proclaimed sense of humor bargains with the terrified lone survivor, “How about if I only eat you if you say the number that I’m thinking of? I promise I won’t cheat. I probably won’t cheat.” Shaun Tan contributes a handful of small illustrations that are, of course, just plain delightful. Grades 9-12. --Ian Chipman

FORMATS:

  Item   Add item
       
  The eBook $19.99 Click here
       
  The book

List Price: $19.99

Price: $13.59 

Click here

 

 

 

 

 

Indian in the Cupboard Study Guide

Suitable for
primary aged students this study guide has learning outcomes in key learning
areas such as English, Art and Society and Environment.

 

 

 

 

 

Coraline

The movie, the book with many lesson plans and activities, the map, the games and the toys