Blooming wonders, fiery magic and ocean secrets - book review

Age 10 plus:

Bloom

Nicola Skinner

Many of the new crop of children’s books like to convey important messages to young children… but few can achieve the sheer originality and entertainment value of Nicola Skinner’s glorious debut novel, Bloom.

Climate change and preserving the green spaces on our precious planet are always high on the list of contemporary concerns and Skinner has these topics well and truly nailed in a fun-filled adventure story that can only be described as blooming wonderful!

Harsh realities and out-of-this world magic, darkness and light, laughter and tears jostle comfortably together in this perfectly imagined tale of a girl who sows the seeds of a better future in the most surprising and unexpected way.

Sorrel Fallowfield lives at Cheery Cottage with her single mum but in all honesty, their home is anything but cheery. In fact, it exudes a gloomy glumness, a grumpy grimness and a grimy greyness that seeps into everything… even mum.

Sorrel can’t fix all the things in the house that are broken so instead, she has decided to be ‘good at being good’ to make her mum smile and to make the broken feeling leave her mum, even if it’s only for a while.

And Sorrel is so good at being good that teachers come to her when they need help remembering the school rules… and there are lots of them at Grittysnit School. Luckily, Sorrel doesn’t have any trouble following them, until the day she discovers a faded packet of Surprising Seeds buried under a tree in her back yard.

Now she’s hearing voices, seeing things, experiencing an almost unstoppable urge to plant the seeds in some very unusual places… and completely failing to win her school’s competition to find The Most Obedient Child of the School. And all that’s before flowers start growing out of her head…

Skinner, who was inspired to write this charming book after a visit to an overgrown country garden, delivers an enchanting, lyrical story starring a lovable young girl with a funny, feisty narrative voice that cannot fail to win hearts and minds.

Sorrel’s amazing story is wacky and wonderfully weird but out of it grow subtle reminders about caring for the environment, guarding our wild places, and standing up to authority, however hard that might seem when you are a child.

Exquisitely written and powerfully imagined, Bloom will add life, meaning and colour to any child’s life…

(HarperCollins Children’s Books, hardback, £12.99)

Age 9 plus:

Pog

Pádraig Kenny