This week Catherine Leung and Johanna McCalmont take us from the cuddly to the creepy as they review three of their favourite new releases.

George & Tao

Reviewed by Catherine Leung

George & Tao is an adorable little picture book with exquisite drawings of puppy George who meets kitten Tao for the first time. It is written and illustrated by well-known author-illustrator, Claude K.Dubois who has published nearly eighty books.

When George and Tao meet for the first time, they are wary of each other as they take a moment to warm up. There is no stopping them after that however, and the new best friends play happily together until an excited chase ends with Tao’s disappearance. After looking all over for him, George eventually goes to the front door to wait for his new friend to return. As the reader turns the page, the four identical illustrations of George waiting, in exactly the same position, very effectively show the passing of time, and are full of emotion!

Young children are sure to warm to these two cuddly characters who are very relatable. They go through similar experiences to young children, such as making new friends, getting overexcited, getting hurt, and looking out for each other. The story portrays the beautiful simplicity of young friendship.

While George and Tao may be cute, they are also larger than life and their characters and emotions really shine through in the irresistible water colour and pencil illustrations. The simplicity of these drawings is enhanced by the minimal text, the spirit of which has been carried over in Daniel Hahn’s translation into English. This is an ideal story to capture the imagination and can be listened to and enjoyed by even very young children.

A wonderful gift for any child from two upwards, and the format is just right – a mini-sized picture book which will fit perfectly into little hands!

Girls

Reviewed by Johanna McCalmont

How do you get yourself and your sweet baby girl out of an unfair deal? What do you say when the foresters whisk you away and capture the Wolf—that you’ve just been taunting behind the barbed wire—instead? Were those Sweet Mother’s Biscuits really such a good idea? And when do your sloppy housekeeping skills become your saving grace, ultimately protecting you and your sister from the reverend with the dark, dark beard?

Many of us, young and old, will be familiar with traditional fairy tales such as Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, and other stories featuring a variety of monsters, goblins and other curious creatures. Many of us have probably also read various retellings or enjoyed the modern, less menacing adaptations for cinema with happier endings. But when did you last read a version where the ‘sweet’ girl outwits her captor in an unexpected and extremely intelligent way? Or when modern technology is both helpful and annoying?

Annet Schaap’s latest book updates seven familiar fairy tales, bringing them into the modern day. She adds her own innovative twists whilst also staying true to the dark side of the originals. The girls in her stories  are more than able to fend for themselves with their lateral thinking and perfect timing while Laura Watkinson’s translation from the Dutch deftly brings this dialogue-rich text to life as we ride the highs and lows of each girl’s experience. Readers will definitely be left wanting more by the time they finish the last story!

Never Tell Anyone Your Name

Reviewed by Johanna McCalmont

You’re sixteen and on your way to Madrid to meet your Dad after visiting your Mum in France. A bit of a trek, but it’s not too complicated a journey, right? But then everything starts to go ominously pear-shaped as you cross the border. First you discover you booked the wrong train, then you realise you’ve got eight hours to kill until the next one, and to top it all off, there’s also that unsatiable pang of hunger gnawing away deep down inside you. So you wander through the small town, watch the dog walkers, meet a girl who disappears again before you know it, call into a church, and, as night falls, bump into the girl again, now accompanied by a friend. But can you trust them? Can you trust yourself? And what about the memory of Lucrecia back in Uruguay still haunting you?

It’s hard to review Never Tell Anyone Your Name without giving away too much of Federico Ivanier’s carefully crafted plot with all its twists and turns, so I’m afraid I’m going to leave you hanging and just say that I was kept guessing right to the end. However, there are plenty of hints about where the story is headed from the very first chapter—such as the descriptions of the characters, the dark, ominously eerie locations, and an incredibly well-known literary reference you can’t miss—so you’ll soon realise you’ve picked up a book that is perfectly suited to this spooky time of year with Halloween on the horizon.

Ivanier’s style, however, is not just cleverly bloodcurdling, it also neatly captures the tension and subtle differences in language and accent of the narrator’s Uruguayan Spanish and the Castilian Spanish of the mysterious girl who crosses his path, neatly introducing us to both cultures. Keen-eyed readers will appreciate the detail and skill with which World Kid Lit’s own Claire Storey has applied several clever strategies in her translation to capture this contrast in a way that seems just as natural as the dialogue between the two teenagers.

If you’re looking for a short, fast-paced YA read with a great soundtrack for a creepy time of year, then make sure you get hold of a copy of Never Tell Anyone Your Name when it comes out this month!

Catherine Leung is a literary translator, children’s picture book author of award-winning Long-Long’s New Year, and editor, having worked at Oxford University Press for a number of years. After a dreamy childhood in rural Devon, with a degree in French and German, her passion for language took her on a journey spanning almost a decade to China via France. While she is now settled in South West London, her journey continues through books and her imagination.

Johanna McCalmont was born in Northern Ireland and now lives in Brussels, Belgium where she works from French, German, Dutch and Italian. Her work has been published by Indiana University Press, Blue Dot Kids Press, Arctis, Los Angeles Review, Asymptote, Lunch Ticket and the European Literature Network. She loves connecting writers with audiences when interpreting at literary festivals and has a particular interest in African literature.