Night Shift by Debi Gliori #bookreview

Debi Gliori, the writer and illustrator of this book, normally creates books for children. This book, on the other hand, is aimed at an older age group as it covers depression.

The afterword explains that she has been "spending most of [her] adult life living through periods of depressive illness" and that her "hope is that this book will help explain what we are going through."

The rest of the book is a series of small black-and-white drawings with little bits of text which tell the story of a female character and her struggle with depression, the depression being represented by a dragon. Luckily it has a happy ending which I thought was nicely done both in the words and the final picture, the way the dragon has disappeared and become something else. 

The book takes a few minutes to read as it is short but the art is good. The black-and-white illustrations suit it given the subject matter. Perhaps the final picture could have been in full colour to emphasise the "shift" that occurs. Maybe this book will help others with depressive illnesses, or help introduce the topic to youngsters so they can better understand it, and if it does then that is a good thing.

Amazon UK link: Night Shift

Charlie and Lola: One Thing by Lauren Child #bookreview

Charlie and Lola: One Thing by Lauren Child #bookreview: I've just read this with my five-year-old daughter. She said, "that was a funny story." Indeed that's what you'd expect from a Charlie and Lola book right from the start with the familiar opening refrain of "I have this sister Lola. She is small and very funny."

Lola spends the book getting distracted by the world around her as she counts the dots on her dress or the leaves on the tree whilst Charlie is helping her learn her numbers. This is whilst they go to the shop with their mum so they can choose "one thing", 

The book is done in the normal art style of the Charlie and Lola books with a few real life images enhancing the pictures. The text is all over the place. It makes it interesting to look at even if you can't read. And with numeracy at the core of the story, it makes maths fun, whether that be adding, taking away, multiplying, telling the time, or counting to a squillion.

You expect a lot from Charlie and Lola books and this one delivers.

Available on Amazon HERE.

Dinosaurs in our Street! by David West

Book review: First impressions of this book are great. It is hardback. The front cover is slightly embossed with the tyrannosaur poking his head out of the Pink Floyd-inspired brick wall background. You can feel his teeth if you want, something you wouldn't want to do if it were real. The book's spine is good too. If you have this sitting on your book shelf a little dinosaur will be keeping its beady eye on you.

Inside all the pages are glossy full colour. There are thirty dinosaurs featured including the well-known ones. Each has a double-page spread with a computer-generated image of the dinosaur in an urban scene with people milling about it. So you'll see a brachiosaurus, for example, standing on its back legs and using its long neck to eat some vegetation from a roof garden at the top of a five-floor block of apartments as people nonchalantly walk past. Also by linking the dinosaurs to these modern urban environments there is a recognisable association that might bring these ancient creatures to life even more than other dinosaur books might.

Beside the images are a couple of paragraphs giving you the lowdown about the dinosaur and a little fact box contains the details of the dinosaur's period, where its fossils have been found, its size, weight and whether it was a herbivore or not, and a scale picture to a human to give you a visual idea as to how big it was. Having checked against Wikipedia quickly though I am not sure of the accuracy of the facts. For example the book says the altirhinus came from the Late Cretaceous period whereas Wikipedia says it came from the Early Cretaceous period. Maybe these things are too hard to estimate and I am probably being too picky.

My 9-year-old daughter loved the book: "It tells you about dinosaurs, how to pronounce their names, whether they are herbivores or carnivores and where their fossils have been found." She loves learning and facts.

My 22-month-year-old son loves it too. Especially when I act out a roaring dinosaur that wants to eat his belly. The pages are at risk of being ripped by him though if he isn't careful.

Overall I can see this being ideal for any young dinosaur fan, and if they want more detail into a particular dinosaur then that can easily be looked up online.

It's on AMAZON now: DINOSAURS IN OUR STREET!

120 Ways to Annoy Your Mother (and Influence People) by Ana Benaroya

I was looking for a book for our daughter, and what better than one that annoys the mother, in 120 ways?

Styled as "part journal, part sketchbook and field guide" this is a fun book not to be taken too seriously. Yes, it is titled 120 ways to annoy your mother and so may be seen as a little controversial with it's little tongue-in-cheek tips to help 11-14 year-olds "transform into a fish" or "turn your life into a soap opera" but I didn't have any problems with it, because it is all a bit of fun, and clearly so.

This is like an ideas book. Each of the 120 ways have 4 tips, some drawing and a little page (most of the time) to add some of your own funny ideas to the pot. It makes for a creative package for the target age group. And bits are funny, although humour is subjective of course.

So overall a fun package.

Available on Amazon (from £9.10 at time of writing): 120 Ways to Annoy Mother  

Publication date: 1 Sep 2014

Ways of Looking: How to Experience Contemporary Art by Ossian Ward

This book is meant to "transform a potentially intimidating encounter with cutting-edge art into a dramatic, sensually rewarding and thought-provoking experience." Well, does it?

If nothing else that sentence makes a good blurb. I must say I haven't felt intimidated by art before, although I haven't experienced many performance pieces (some of which are mentioned in the book) with artworks of that type in-particular having the potential to be excruciating I guess. 

What this book does do is provide a tool to approach contemporary art pieces (contemporary being 2000 onwards) "as if it were your first experience with that format," so as to get the most from it - the TABULA tool. This is introduced at the book beginning, tabula rasa being Latin for fresh slate and TABULA standing for Time, Association, Background, Understanding, Look again, and Assess. The author then goes on to show how to use this approach in the following chapters where contemporary art is grouped in categories: entertainment, confrontation, event, message, joke, spectacle and meditation.

In truth these chapters could have been grouped by anything really, and there is also crossover between them, but they act as a classification to help you bring pieces of art such as big playground slides, an estate agent tour, and some copper boxes that get FedExed from gallery to gallery alive.

The tool is simple to remember and use, even for a more-than-casual art observer as myself, and would work with non-contemporary pieces too. The author is impressive when he delves into pieces through the book (see for example the spotlight features at the end of each chapter), although some art he brings up is glossed over quickly. Also not all the art mentioned has a visual image within the glossy full-colour pages of the book. Similarly video pieces, performance pieces and other "scheduled or timed" pieces are difficult to decipher from a still image so having an internet device handy when reading this book to reference these would be desirable. Even then you may still need to do what the author recommends which is to go and see the artwork in person to get the most out of it (I haven't done that though).

There may be a London bias given the author's past as chief art critic at Time Out London, but the artwork featured still covers the world, even including an out-of-the-way rural Thai province. Anyway you would expect London to feature prominently in such a book anyway so this is not a criticism.

Overall then this book introduces a useful tool that,  if used, should help to bring out a finer appreciation of contemporary art (and non-contemporary too) even without being well-versed in any art history knowledge.

Publication date: 1 Sep 2014

Amazon UK link (£7.99 at time of writing): Ways of Looking: How to Experience Contemporary Art