Man, we were properly obsessed with this book when it first turned up at ReaditDaddy Towers and you know what? Though our copy is pretty well mauled, we still use it today as there's no better way to pass a long boring school holiday than to delve into this exquisite book and start putting together a new game idea.

We're totally in love with board games (well, games of any description really) and Kevan and Viv have done such a great job of including absolutely everything you need to create your own awesome game ideas. All you really need to bring to the table is yourself, your besties or kids, and your imagination.

We read through the whole book before embarking on a project we'd had on the backburner for a long time - a strange board game of sheer chance where your aim is to make your way around a supermarket, snagging as many goodies as possible but avoiding the wandering grannies who inhabit the store, and will nag you to bits to go and pick their prescriptions up for them - thus robbing you of the chance of nabbing more groceries than your opponent.

We worked on several versions of the game, inspired in some part by horrible shopping trips we'd had in the past - and amazingly the game held together pretty well. So well in fact that we still dig it out from time to time to play it.

We devised several other board games and a couple of card games too. I firmly believe that there's no better bonding experience for a family than to tough it out designing a game, then of course playing each other at it.

Certainly a better way of deciding who gets to do the washing up than tossing a coin.

Original review links and articles: 

ReadItDaddy's Second Book of the Week - Week Ending 20th September 2019: "Board Games to Create and Play" by Kevan Davis and Viviane Schwarz (Pavilion Children's Books)

Building our own board game with "Board Games to Create and Play" by Kevan Davis and Viviane Schwarz (Pavilion Children's Books)

You can't go wrong with a penguin, in fact having a penguin as your guide to some of the most amazing locations on planet earth might be a real boost right now. So let's have a closer look at "Big City Atlas" by Maggie Li, out today from Pavilion Children's Books.

Our cheerful and personable little flipper-tipped host takes you on a world tour of 28 amazing cities. 

A fabulous, beautiful book about our amazing oceans, Katie Cottle's "The Blue Giant" is out today, from Pavilion Children's Books.

Saving our planet, and the plastic in our oceans is of course a hugely important topic that children are focused on at the moment, and this book brings a gentle story of Coral and her mum who are enjoying a lovely day at the beach, when an urgent plea for help comes - directly from the ocean itself!

It's a giant. A blue giant. It is made of water, fish, and sea plants and has a stirring plea to help clean up the ocean.

Coral and her mom agree to help, donning their scuba-diving outfits and setting off to sea. But they can't do it alone...can they?

This stunning follow-up to Katie Cottle's debut picture book The Green Giant is another entertaining and beautiful eco-tale from the 2017 winner of the Batsford Prize.

Over 30 years, and through over 3 million book sales, this rather grumpy little fellow has been delighting kids and it's another one of those cheeky books we just can't bear to part with.

"The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None Of His Business" by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch was a word-of-mouth recommendation from a good friend, and we bought it at a time when C was going through that age that practically all kids go through, where scatological humour is their be all and end all, and they just cannot resist any mere mention in children's books of farts, wees, poos or other bodily functions.

The story setup is deliciously simple. A mole pops his head out of the ground one morning, only to be dumped on by a mystery plopper. He then spends the rest of the book thoroughly investigating who could've done such a disgusting and heinous thing.



Once he finds out, he exacts a brilliantly fitting revenge.

There's a bit of natural history mixed into the comical story, as author and illustrator brilliantly depict all types of animal poos before they get to the nitty gritty of who the culprit was.



(Love the expression in that last panel)

Like all good children's books the core idea is simple but the execution is utterly brilliant. Well deserved of a permanent place on our shelves.

Original Review Link:

ReadItDaddy's Super Special 30th Anniversary Book of the Week - Week Ending 2nd August 2019: "The Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of his Business" by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch (Pavilion Children's Books)

Ahh, wonderful! This is the sort of Book of the Week winner that has us seeking out a lovely warm beverage before curling up in our favourite comfortable chair for a few hours of blissful escapism.

"100 Children's Books that inspire our world" curated by Colin Salter is a lovingly hand-picked collection of some of the finest children's books of all time, gathered together in a gorgeous hardback volume that is an absolute must for kidlit fans.

Every single page seems to open up into a world of daydreamy nostalgia, as Colin brings together facts and stats about the books, as well as cover shots and other information that will - for the reader - instantly make you feel like you did when you first encountered those books in your own lives.

For example, reading about "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle reminded me of reading it as a child, but also reading it to my child - my daughter demanded this one again and again over the course of many bedtimes, always pausing to poke her podgy little sausage fingers through the holes in the book where the caterpillar scoffed his way through a week of treats.

A childhood favourite author and his amazing books. Richard Scarry's busy and amazing story worlds!

Then there was "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" to pull out another favourite much celebrated book. As a kid, coming from a fairly poor background much like Charlie himself, Roald Dahl's rich descriptions of the sweets and chocolate, as well as his brilliant depiction of characters good and bad were just amazing for a young emerging reader dipping into 'proper' books for the first time.

Herge's Adventures of Tintin! I can still hear the announcer's voice for the animated series, but I loved the books first!

These and many of the other books mentioned in this fantastic collection may feel like 'popular' choices, and I'm sure there'll be folk out there who will moan and complain that certain books were included, and certain others missed out, but this is a truly brilliant 'bible' for children's book obsessives (like us) and a real treat to see such an amazing collection gathered together in one place.

"The Secret Garden" - Another one of those childhood books that became hugely inspirational and well loved, and one I was very happy to share with my kiddo too!

Sum this book up in a sentence: A lovingly curated collection of 100 of the most amazing children's books ever produced, each evoking their own memories and many still well loved and well read by us today.

"100 Children's Books that inspire our world" by Colin Salter is out now, published by Pavilion Children's Books (kindly supplied for review). 

You won't have long to wait for this one, in fact it's out tomorrow so you've got no excuse - nip down to your favourite bookstore of choice in the morning for a copy of "The Last Tree" by Emily Haworth-Booth.

We've seen a huge explosion of books on the blog that deal with the climate crisis in several amazing and fairly direct ways, but sometimes you need a bit more 'oomph' in your story to make it accessible to younger readers, but also avoid the 'oh no not again' eyeroll from older book fans.

Emily manages this with aplomb in a tale that begins with a tribe of people all looking for a place to shelter.

The mountains are too windy, the valleys are too wet, the baking hot plains are no good either - and soon the folk find an amazing forest filled with trees.

The air is cooler there but not too cold, and those amazing leafy trees offer brilliant shelter.

That is - alas - until things start to go horribly wrong...


To greedily protect their new find, they come up with a plan to hack down all the trees, and cart them off to build a colossal wall, hopefully to avoid anyone else being able to move into their newfound home. A huge mistake, when only one tiny little withered tree is left. The last tree in fact.


But - as in the real actual here and now world - it's the kids that have the brains in this story. They realise that the answer does not lie in deforestation, the answer is to nurture that one last tree, encouraging it to grow stronger, and stronger, and stronger.

Emily has expertly conjured up a story that may seem quite simplistic at first, but does a brilliant job of holding up a mirror to our own world, where 'grown ups' seem hell bent in driving the planet towards the very brink, yet a strong steely-eyed army of youngsters are doing their level best to show us the error of our ways, and hopefully drag us back from the brink of irreparable climate change.

Sum this book up in a sentence: As we mentioned at the top of the review, this is a brilliant book to introduce kids to the concepts of ecology and saving the environment while giving older kids plenty to nod along to, and the whole package is extremely engaging, classy and dare we say even fun to read aloud?

"The Last Tree" by Emily Haworth-Booth is out tomorrow, 6th February 2020, published by Pavilion Children's Books (kindly supplied for review)

Getting a curmudgeonly 11 year old to review a book about potty training would normally be a hopeless cause - if it wasn't for the fact that this is a Sam Lloyd book, and Sam's books were a huge part of C's early reading journey.

"Put your Botty on the Potty" by Sam Lloyd might at first appear to be a zany scatological look at something that we might now take for granted, but for many parents trying to get their fidgety little misses or misters to stay put while they do their business isn't easy - so what better than a hilarious and strangely captivating lift the flap book to keep them occupied while they do their number ones and number twos!

With Sam's trademark crazy humour, little ones will soon demand this book every time they sit down to take a load off. Thankfully it's nicely designed and should survive a good wet-wiping or two!

Little Moo Monster is growing up and no longer happy to be in a nappy. Moo wants to be more grown up than his baby sister. So the lovable monster discards his diaper and suddenly there's poop everywhere (oh gawd, we do remember this all too well, even though it was over a decade ago!)

Charles Darwin was an amazing pioneer, botanist, biologist and explorer, and of course one of the most important scientific minds of his time. We recognise his achievements and amazing adventures, and in "Darwin's Voyage of Discovery" by Jake Williams, you'll get to find out lots more about this amazing man.

It's time to board the HMS Beagle and follow the remarkable journeys from England to Cape Verde, Brazil to the Galapagos, Tahiti to Australia - journeys that inspired our modern knowledge of the natural world.  Giant sloths, the incredibly weird Duck-Billed platypus, scary tarantulas, glowing fireflies and many other weird and wonderful creatures were found on Darwin's globe-trotting voyages. 

Ah, how easy it is to think that we know everything about our amazing planet and the people who live on it as it cruises around the sun.

Yet, in "Adventures on Earth' by Simon Tyler, you'll get a vicarious chance to discover what life is like for indigenous people living in some of the harshest and most extreme conditions across our planet.

From the blistering hot sun and arid atmosphere in our deserts, to the frost-bitten toe-tingling cold of our frozen wastes.

Simon Tyler's graphic style takes us on a whirlwind journey across the globe as we discover what life is like in the highest, deepest, coldest and hottest regions.

Following on from his superb book "Adventures in Space, it's time to join him once again in discovering the world's most wild terrain and the humans and animals whose lives are under threat from the unfolding environmental catastrophe our world is facing. 

Climb every mountain!

"If I had a camel, I'd camel in the morning. I'd camel in the evening. All over this land!"

By now you'll probably have seen our "Book of the Week" review of "Board Games to Create and Play" by Kevan Davis and Viviane Schwarz, just out from Pavilion Children's Books.

We take our board gaming very seriously indeed at ReadItDaddy Towers, as you'll probably know from regular visits to the blog. So we couldn't wait to start building our own game using this fabulous book.

We'd had several ideas. C wanted to do something with cute kittens in it but we couldn't think of a central theme. For ages we'd joked about doing a videogame that was based around being stuck in a supermarket on a saturday, frustrated that everyone else moves slower than us, or just sits there gossiping right in front of the aisle or section we want to grab our food from. So there was the seed of an idea and "AULDIES" (formerly known as PIDL) was born.

First we started off with a very basic rule set:

Roughly sketching the rule set (with C's awesome picture of a speeding granny!)

We used one of Kevan and Viviane's board designs, slightly adapted to feature the sort of stuff we find in our local supermarket and drew up a basic version in pencil first...

PIDL board complete with roughly sketched game pieces

Doing things quickly, we built the prototype game and couldn't wait to get on and play it.

Basically, you throw two dice - the big white one to move your grannies, and the black one to move your game character. The idea is to move around the board and pick up your shopping. But the grannies can block you, and if they land on you - or you land on them - they will send you all the way back to the Chemist to pick up their prescriptions!

At any time the player can 'bank' all their items by moving through the checkout squares, effectively finishing the game but the player with the most points for their shopping isn't necessarily the player with the most items, so there are tempting bonus items to grab, and the 'gamble' of going back into the supermarket for items you've forgotten, or just to try and out-score the other player!

So we played it - and surprisingly we laughed a lot, and it worked as a game concept!

Ooh an unbearably smug victor!

(Needless to say, C won!)

I'd probably say building the game took around an hour, the rule set about half an hour - and then the next day we went in to try and build the "Proper" coloured version of the game with player pieces, shopping and a colourful board design from C.

Drawing characters and shopping items. MAN that was hard!

C getting busy colouring in and designing the board

The final result - a game that C described as "The Best Board Game She's Ever Played!" and hours of fun for both of us. Really can't recommend this book highly enough, it's absolutely perfect! So here's the nearly finished article (we still haven't come up with a name and a logo but if any board game companies out there want to back us, we're all ears, hah!)

The final game - as busy, crazy and chaotic as a real supermarket full of old ladies!

"Board Games to Create and Play" by Kevan Davis and Viviane Schwarz is out now, published by Pavilion Children's Books (kindly supplied for review)

Our Second Book of the Week should appeal to those of you who know your Meeple from your Exploding Kitten! Super-fab board game experts Kevan Davis and Viviane Schwarz have created the ultimate maker project book for those of us who love to shake a dice or spin a spinner in our spare time.

"Board Games to Create and Play" is the sort of book that's designed to be pulled apart, scribbled on and turned into something truly amazing (I know, it's not easy for us to wreck gorgeous books - but this one positively begs you to!)

Inside, Kevan and Viviane have given you all the information and templates you'll need to start building your own games - and a ton of superb ideas covering just about any subject you can think of basing your game on.

"Cobweb Castle" - A superb example game to get you started with ace ideas!

Game design is educational, teaching kids valuable lessons about building rule sets, structural construction of the actual game / play pieces (if you really want to go all-out to create something super!) but also about building something that's fun to play, even downright sneaky and tactical if you're so inclined.

The example games are fab fun to just play through as well, if you're not feeling creative. But once you've dived into this book you'll find the perfect entry point - not just for board gaming, but for making your own - which is durned exciting stuff in itself.

An introduction to game design and what you'll need.

It's a truly brilliant timesink - and it's definitely going to be something we'll spend a lot of time with as we're absolute board game fanatics. In fact if you want to find out how our first game design went, check out our accompanying article here!

We really can't recommend this book highly enough and can't wait to start building our next game! Thanks Kevan and Viviane, you've come up (top) trumps with this one!

Sum this book up in a sentence: A superb jumpstart kit for would-be board game designers, or just folk who love playing games from a truly amazing creative team!

"Board Games to Create and Play" by Kevan Davis and Viviane Schwarz is out on 3rd October 2019, published by Pavilion Children's Books (kindly supplied for review). 

Bodies are amazing things, and in "Odd Science - Stupendous Body" by James Olstein, you'll get to find out just how incredible we really are. Yes even you!

So what makes us and our bodies so amazing?

There are tons of amazing facts crammed into this book.

For example, why do we get brain freeze when we eat cold ice cream?

How much energy do our hearts generate every day?

How much food will our bodies process in the space of our lifetime?

All these questions and many, many more are answered, with a cool sense of humour threading through the book, largely thanks to James' awesome illustrations.

Sum this book up in a sentence: Find out just how amazing your body really is in this fact filled and awesome book in the brilliant Odd Science range.

"Odd Science: Stupendous Body" by James Olstein is out now, published by Pavilion Children's Books (kindly supplied for review). 

C couldn't even talk back when we  originally reviewed this book but whenever we'd spot it at the library, she'd enthusiastically point at this, and once it was in her grasp she absolutely wouldn't let it go.

Like many kids who've encountered our super-special Anniversary "Book of the Week" choice this week, she was instantly drawn to the quirky little chap wearing his unintentional poo-hat on the cover of Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch's brilliant "The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew it was None of his Business"

As Pavilion celebrate the 30th anniversary of this book, I can't quite believe it's been ten years since we fell in love with it, let alone 30 since it first arrived so it was great to revisit the book clad in its new 30th Anniversary cover, and see what a cynical 11 year old thought of it now.

There are so many reasons to love this, the utterly subversive nature of it (and if we've learned one thing over 9 years of book blogging, it's that most kids - even 11 year olds - can't resist a scatologically themed giggly book like this).

On one level it's a classic revenge story, the sort of thing we wish modern children's books had the guts and audacity to deliver more often rather than sickly-sweet missives about friendship and discovering your true self.

The story of Mole innocently waking up one day, emerging from his hole, and ending up wearing a poo on his head  - then making it his mission to discover who was responsible via a hilarious journey of discovery amongst the plops, squirts, squits and bumbles of the animal kingdom - is completely timeless. It's also very funny - and we use the word 'funny' here not in the ironic sense of the usual 'funny' books. It's genuinely funny to see this angry mole blustering his way through a series of further poo-related near-misses as he sets out to achieve his goal and bring the miscreant to justice.

It's deservedly become a true classic in every sense of the word, and I've lost count of the number of folk who we recommended this to, and who eagerly sauntered off to pick up a copy.

Looking at it again, both of us were struck by how brilliantly irreverent and fresh it still feels. Sure, it's easy for children's books to rely on poo and bum gags for giggles, but there's more to this, there's  a (slightly grim) lesson about what animals poos look like, and if you look at the modern children's book market, there are quite a few non-fiction titles that owe more than a nod to this brilliant fictional story.

The illustrations are so good that you can almost smell them (yeek!), the story bounces along with the most satisfying pay-off you can imagine - and though there were a couple of follow ups, nothing quite matches the brilliance of this.

Check out the pavilion website for a ton of brilliant resources around this fab book

Sum this book up in a sentence: a ploppy-squishy but brilliantly well-formed firm stool of a tale that has become a complete classic, just as good now as it was when it was originally released 30 years ago.

Read our original OG review from 2010 here!

I'm wondering just how long we can maintain enough cheese puns to do "The Big Stink" by Lucy Freegard proper justice.

It's a Brie-liant new story book about a cheese-loving mouse and his arch nemesis, a detective cat named Rita.

Charlie loves a bit of emmenthal and is a notorious cheese thief.

"Wait, isn't this just 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea' with a few tweaks?"

An 11 year old's critique can be withering at times, and that's pretty much how our review of "Big Cat" by Emma Lazell began.

In fact, "Big Cat" might bear a tiny resemblance to the aforementioned classic, heck it even rather cheekily references that very book (with a tiny tweak or two to avoid any copyright issues) within the story of a little girl called Isobel who is rather surprised to find her beloved Grandmother taking a rather large moggy under her wing.

You see, the delightful old dear has lost her glasses and she can't see a thing without them.

Big cat with a giraffe-like neck!

Cheeky reference, all things considered!

At the start of the year we wrote a post hoping that in 2019 we'd see a sharp increase in children's stories that dealt with environmental issues. We've seen plenty about the oceans, and the need to stem the use of single-use plastics but we've been hoping to see books that tackle things with a little more of a wider scope.

"The Green Giant" by Katie Cottle is absolutely perfect, combining all the elements that we'd normally love to bits in a standard 'story' picture book, but subtly weaving in a distinct moral message about how we take our world for granted, how we do the most terrible things to it, and what the impact of continuing to behave like that will ultimately lead to.

Will we have a world fit to leave to our children?

The Green Giant here isn't some sweetcorn-shilling lantern-jawed chap. He's discovered in a mysterious rusting old greenhouse at a young girl's grandad's house. 

Sometimes doing nothing can be so boooooooring!

Yeah I'd be scared, well a little...

So much for the city...the green giant is country-bound

Taking a break from all things vehicle-shaped for a moment, here's William Bee's latest adventure for his fabulous artist character Arty Farty.

In "Arty! First Artist in Space" NASA has a problem.

Try as it might it can't recruit any famous artists to volunteer for the space programme. There's an awesome opportunity to paint amongst the stars, but no one quite fancies being strapped into a rocket and shot off into the stygian void.

Arty Farty doesn't really like the sound of it either, but his agent can't miss an opportunity to make a fast buck off the back of an amazing PR opportunity like this, so signs Arty up.

After some rather stomach-churning training, it's time for Arty to don his special art-supply-laden spacesuit and roar off into space.

First stop: The Moon!

Can you imagine being a colourful and inspirational artist and fetching up on a grey dustball like that?

Sacre Bleu! No way are we going into space, sayeth these famous artists.

Arty soon has plans though, plans to change space forever - through the medium of ART!

Arty's super-pushy agent Mr Grimaldi can't wait to sign Arty up for a seemingly impossible mission

This is a hilarious adventure from a hugely talented storyteller and illustrator, which made us chuckle loads (we loved that spread with the famous artists!)

Not the most inspiring landscape to paint, right?

Sum this book up in a sentence: Where no frog has gone before, where no artist has gone before, where no book has gone before!

"Arty! First Artist in Space" by William Bee is out now, published by Pavilion Children's Books (kindly supplied for review). 

This is an absolute treat for animal fans, who love reading tons of facts and figures about our cuddly, spiky and feathery pals in the animal kingdom.

The "Odd Science" series is a new line from Pavilion  gathering together tons of facts and figures about different subjects and "Odd Science: Incredible Creatures" by James Olstein is an absolute fact-fest covering tons and tons of animals that kids will know and some they may not be familiar with.

I can definitely speak from experience that part of the joy of non-fiction titles is reading something interesting that you can share with others, and C has been walking around with this book reeling out loads of interesting nuggets from within its pages.

For example, do you know which animal has the most dense fur in the animal kingdom?


Or how many times a Woodpecker bashes its head against trees in order to 'mine' for tasty insects?



All these and more appear in this diminutive but fact-filled little book of awesomeness. Loved the presentation too with really nice clear text and simple graphical illustrations accompanying. Utterly brill!

Sum this book up in a sentence: An absolute must for animal fans with tons of facts and interesting snippets of information for nature-loving kids everywhere.

"Odd Science: Incredible Creatures" by James Olstein is out on 7th February 2019, published by Pavilion Children's Books (kindly supplied for review).

Time for another journey into the stratosphere and beyond, as we take a look at another fabulous title for budding astronauts...