Ibarajo Road by Harry Allen

"Ibarajo Road" is set in 1984 in Nigeria and is about a person “who kills and trades children”.

The main character is Charlie. He is from a wealthy white family in Nigeria. He attends a fee-paying school that “was custom built to specifications by a company in America to ensure quality.”

One weekend his parents are away so he organises for his mates to come round for a night out to the Crocodile Bar, a place that “can get very dangerous at night”, where he hopes to pick up some girls for him and his mates. But the night goes disastrously wrong as one of his friends gets slashed with a knife. This incident leads to him being expelled from school. However “there is one option, one way to avoid expulsion. If you can convince me that you have found a worthwhile way to spend your time, something that will reflect well on the school, then you will only be excluded for the rest of the academic year.”

And so begins his voluntary work in Ilakaye Refuge Centre, a refuge for lepers, drug addicts, the homeless, the crippled, abandoned babies, the mentally disturbed, those affected by AIDS, and so on.

Charlie becomes invested in his work and along the way learns more about the relationship between Joseph Obohense, the head manager of Ilakaye, and Michael Danlami, the priest who was a lawyer, who was a charity worker and who is primarily a seller of children. Danlami will also do everything to ruin Joseph and with the right bribes “the authorities are revoking Joseph’s lease. They are demanding that Ilakaye be handed over.”

It is left to Charlie and his friends Guppy and Yejide to ensure justice is done and that the child snatcher does not prevail.

This was a very good book that tugs at the heartstrings and inspires the reader to think about what they could do for those less fortunate than them.

Publication date: 2nd August 2012

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed HERE.)

Practice & Learn French: Ages 9-11 by CGP Books

This is a book and DVD-Rom (to help with pronunciations). The DVD Rom has a nice little pocket at the back of the book to keep it in so it hopefully won't get lost. It also has the 7-9 and 5-7 French modules on it which are relevant to the separate books for that age group. These sections cover simpler versions of what this book covers plus bits about "in my pencil case", "my house" and "where do you live?" As for this book for the 9-11 age group the topics covered are:

- Hello!

- What is your name?

- Numbers

- Colours

- Months

- My family

- Animals

- Clothes

- Food

- What do you like doing?

- What time is it?

- The weather

- In my town

- Masculine and feminine

- Plurals

The book has activities for each as well as an answers section which can be pulled out of the centre so that your child's work can be checked. You may want to take this bit out (and it is easily detachable) before you give the book to your child in case they are tempted to cheat.

This book cannot be used again once done (unless you photocopy the pages). That's ok I suppose seeing as you want your child to progress to the next level anyway, but not so ok if you want another child to also do the same exercises. 

Overall then this is a useful aid to your child's learning, but probably to be used in conjunction with other teaching.

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed HERE.)

The Merrybegot by Julie Hearn

What did people do before they had TVs? The answer is they went witch hunting. This book is set at "the height of the witch craze in England" in the 1640s. The main character is Nell and she becomes the innocent victim of one of these witch hunts, on the verge of being hanged at one point.

The story is in two parts interlinking parts. That of Nell, and the confession of Patience Madden, one of the village minister's daughters. Together they form the story of what happened.

The minister is "a right miserable bogger. A killjoy and a Puritan." So what would he do if one of her unwed daughters got pregnant? He'd cover it up and blame her daughter's period of hiding on a witch, that witch being Nell. But Nell is a merrybegot, "a child sacred to nature", thus has powers on her side to help her survive this victimisation. 

The minister enrols the help of Matthew Hopkins, the Witch-Finder General, a character who existed in real life. The other real life figure that features in the story is Charles II. However it is a fictional world with fairies and piskies featuring so any historians wanting to moan about the accuracy of their cameos should not bother.

The book does well to bring out the way it must have been felt to be the innocent victim of a witch hunt, and how powerless women and girls were when more reputable, in the eyes of society, people accused them and worked the locals up into a frenzy to nail them. 

The story does fizzle out at the end as all the loose ends are tied up after the main story arc has come to a conclusion, but overall a really enjoyable read.

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed HERE.)

It's Lovely When You Smile by Sam McBratney and Charles Fuge

It’s lovely when your child smiles. This is one of my 2-almost-3-year-old’s favourite bedtime stories at the moment.

The story is about Roo the child Kangaroo who is grumpy and his mother is trying to get him to smile. But he doesn’t, not until the end of the story of course.

The pictures are quality throughout and always contain Roo and his mum, plus a duck, mouse, and a bee who just like following them around.

My daughter likes to pretend she doesn’t want to smile throughout too, until the end when she does her fake smile – screwing up her eyes and lips to make a smile. It is very funny.

Then she will read the story on her own, mixing her own words with the bits she can remember from the book.

It’s enough to make you smile. 

I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed on Amazon UK HERE.

Snow White in New York by Fiona French

I didn't think this book was all that. My daughter did though, and perhaps that is what matters. Her star rating would be higher than mine.

The book transposes the Snow White story to New York in the 1920s. The mirror becomes a newspaper, the apple a cherry in a cocktail, the dwarfs become jazz-men and the Prince a reporter. So not exactly fairy tale.

Also the tale is really condensed. The jazz-men hardly appear at all. Snow White gets poisoned and then suddenly on the next page the story of her death is in the newspapers.

This book won the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1986. That medal is for distinguished illustration in a book for children. The illustrations are okay, in the Art Deco style popular in the 20s, but the story isn't.

People are always trying to bring a fresh angle to well-known fairy tales such as this. A much better attempt at this is Cinderella's Secret Diary by Faye Hanson.

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed for purchase HERE.)

Leading Teams: Tools and Techniques for Successful Team Leadership from the Sports World by Paolo Guenzi and Dino Ruta

This was an interesting book. This would surely be a 5 out of 5 rating for someone who is passionate both about sports and leadership. For me though my passion is more on the sports side so for the parts with no mention of sport, for example the whole of chapter 2, my enjoyment was less, but still overall I liked this and learnt from it, having never read any leadership material before.

The chapters:

1. Why Sport and Management?

2. Management Models of Team Leadership

3. A New Team Leadership Model

4. The Team Leader as Manager

5. The Team Leader as Coach

6. Team Leadership: A Word from the Coaches

The main things I learnt are that “to transfer ideas from sports to business and vice versa, first we need to clarify the key similarities and dissimilarities between the two,” and just general leadership stuff I didn’t think about before, such as how a leader should do their best to reduce uncertainty for their followers.

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed to purchase HERE.) 

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and read by Luke Evans

Treasure Island is a classic story. This is an abridged version of it, and lasts for 1 hour 5 minutes. I play it at night for my 6-year-old daughter as she goes to sleep. Here is her summary of her beginning of the story:

• The person says "15 men on a dead man's chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum".
• Someone comes in and wants some rum. Jim goes to get it and he sits down at the table and motions Jim to come near. Then he says, "is your table for my mate Bill?" Jim said he did not know his mate Bill, but he was the captain.
• The captain strode in, opening the door without looking to the left or right.
• The captain turned around with the look of a man who's seen a ghost.
• Then the captain says "Black Dog."
• Jim left them together and went to get some rum.

Her favourite bit of the whole story is the blind beggar part.

After a few listens she liked this, but not as much as her previous favourites from the series, Bill Nighy Reads The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Dominic Cooper Reads Oliver Twist.

(I got this AUDIO book through Amazon Vine. It is listed HERE.)