Entertaining, comprehensive, and encouraging; for anyone who’s curious about how stories work.
A how-to guide from Ireland for young writers and readers that’s jam-packed with practical tips and ideas.
Laureate na nÓg Forde’s warm, enthusiastic tone and wealth of prompts offer readers a solid grounding in story construction. Chatty contributions by notable authors like Eoin Colfer, Derek Landy, and Sheena Wilkinson go behind the scenes through letters to readers that follow each short but information-packed chapter. The first seven chapters suggest ways to create and structure a story, from finding inspiring narrative catalysts to building convincing characterization, developing a plot, creating a setting, starting your story, crafting an ending, and worldbuilding. The next four chapters decode popular genres: comedy, mystery, historical fiction, and legends and fables. The final chapter advocates for thorough editing. The book avoids hard-and-fast writing rules: Imagination and fun are clearly as important as craft. Inventive exercises support practice and can also free a stuck writer. The book is especially valuable because it offers readers a springboard to understanding how the various elements of narratives work—Forde introduces point of view, voice, protagonist, conflict, arc, tone, exposition, motive, and much more. Murphy’s clever spot-art vignettes, depicting children with different skin tones and abilities, and diagrams clarifying the writing principles add energy and humor and helpfully present the material. The friendly voice, useful strategies, and excellent advice make this a valuable and accessible resource.
Entertaining, comprehensive, and encouraging; for anyone who’s curious about how stories work. (contributor bios) (Nonfiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781915071903
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Little Island
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
Preposterous situations and farcical sound-alike sentences will elicit groans and giggles.
Homophones in versatile parallel sentences create absurd scenarios.
The pattern is simple but endlessly funny: Two sentences, each illustrated, sound the same but are differentiated by their use of homophones. On the verso of the opening spread a cartoon restaurant scene shows a diner lifting a plate of spaghetti and meatballs to a waiter who removes a dark hair from the plate of noodles: “The hair came forth.” (Both figures have brown skin.) Opposite, the scene shows a race with a tortoise at the finish line while a hare trails the tortoise, a snake, and a snail: “The hare came fourth.” The humorous line drawings feature an array of humans, animals, and monsters and provide support and context to the sentences, however bizarre they may seem. New vocabulary is constantly introduced, as is the idea that spelling and punctuation can alter meaning. Some pairings get quite sophisticated; others are rather forced. “The barred man looted the establishment. / The bard man luted the establishment” stretches the concept, paralleling barred with bard as adjectives and looted with luted as verbs. The former is an orange-jumpsuited White prisoner in a cell; the other, a brown-skinned musician strumming a lute for a racially diverse group of dancers. Poetic license may allow for luted, though the word lute is glaringly missing from the detailed glossary.
Preposterous situations and farcical sound-alike sentences will elicit groans and giggles. (Informational picture book. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-72820-659-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A stimulating outing to the furthest reaches of our knowledge, certain to inspire deep thoughts.
From a Caldecott and Sibert honoree, an invitation to take a mind-expanding journey from the surface of our planet to the furthest reaches of the observable cosmos.
Though Chin’s assumption that we are even capable of understanding the scope of the universe is quixotic at best, he does effectively lead viewers on a journey that captures a sense of its scale. Following the model of Kees Boeke’s classic Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps (1957), he starts with four 8-year-old sky watchers of average height (and different racial presentations). They peer into a telescope and then are comically startled by the sudden arrival of an ostrich that is twice as tall…and then a giraffe that is over twice as tall as that…and going onward and upward, with ellipses at each page turn connecting the stages, past our atmosphere and solar system to the cosmic web of galactic superclusters. As he goes, precisely drawn earthly figures and features in the expansive illustrations give way to ever smaller celestial bodies and finally to glimmering swirls of distant lights against gulfs of deep black before ultimately returning to his starting place. A closing recap adds smaller images and additional details. Accompanying the spare narrative, valuable side notes supply specific lengths or distances and define their units of measure, accurately explain astronomical phenomena, and close with the provocative observation that “the observable universe is centered on us, but we are not in the center of the entire universe.”
A stimulating outing to the furthest reaches of our knowledge, certain to inspire deep thoughts. (afterword, websites, further reading) (Informational picture book. 8-10)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4623-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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