Sophy Henn is back with an all new character set to steal your heart. Here's "Edie" and she's lovely!

We love a fantastic and original detective yarn or two here on the blog, as you've probably noticed.

Doubly so if the detective in question is a mighty young lady who knows her own mind.

We're happy to share with you the new cover with art by super-talented Lisa Horton for "Rose Raventhorpe Investigates: Black Cats and Butlers" by Janine Beacham!

In the story, young Rose is drawn into a mystery as several butlers - including her own faithful man friday - are mysteriously murdered.

Rose must try and untangle a densely woven plot or two against the atmospheric backdrop of Yorke.

Can Rose get to the bottom of the mystery, before she too ends up like Argyle?

This stunning debut by Australian author Janine Beacham is definitely one for the curious, who love stories that are a little dark and a little different.

In Janine's own words, here's the story behind Rose Raventhorpe's debut adventure...



When I was a kid I found a competition on the back of a cereal box. WIN A BUTLER FOR A WEEK, it said. ‘Tell us why you would like a butler!’

It sounded fun. I asked my mum if I could enter. ‘A butler would never come here!’ she said.

We lived on a dairy farm in Western Australia. We had haybales, cows, chickens, swooping magpies, and poisonous snakes. It was great, but it was not butler-like territory. The idea of a butler cleaning our house, serving a posh dinner, and saying ‘yes, Madam,’ appealed to me. We didn’t have a lot of posh things.

So I entered the competition. I wrote about the butler being able to help my mother. It wasn’t a very good entry. I didn’t win.

But the idea stayed with me. What if a butler did come to a house like ours? What would he do? What would my ideal butler be like?

I imagined a butler called Heddsworth. He would be English, because all the butlers in books and TV and movies were English. He would be very polite. He would call me Miss. He would polish the ute, and feed the farm dog from a silver bowl. And, I decided, he would be an excellent swordsman and shot.

I tried to write a story about this, but it lacked something. What I liked most about Heddsworth was his duelling skills. And he had nobody to duel on a farm. So I put the story aside.

Many, many years later, I read the Harry Potter books. They were inspiring. If JK Rowling could make such a success of a book about wizards, maybe I could write about duelling butlers!

So I tried a new version of the story. This time I set it in Victorian England. I needed a plot, and a young protagonist. A murder mystery would do. A butler would be killed – the heroine’s butler.

I had a new story, but it STILL wasn’t all that good. What was missing?

I went on holidays to the UK, and a friend told me I should visit York. I did. As soon as I stepped off the bus into the city, I saw a cat statue on a wall. And I had an epiphany. This was where I would set the book! My heroine would be called Rose, because she was from York. The butlers would live in an alternative version of York. Yorke with an E!

I added grave-robbers, and a magician, and underground tunnels and cat statues with eerie powers. I rewrote and polished and thought and wrote. And the story that came out of a cereal box became my first published book.

What does it take to make us "Book Happy"? It's the new Hygge, I'm telling you...!

Our Book of the Week this week may have been out for quite a while but it's a truly stunning non-fiction title that deserves another look...

Our Chapter Book of the Week this week is the third book in a delightful little series about a girl and her best friend (who just happens to be a Puffin!)

Well it might not look like much, but it's got it where it counts!

This week's ReadItTorial found us spending a very interesting saturday morning doing something I personally hadn't done in a good 30 years - enjoying computers for fun!

When messing around with computers (or at least trying to keep the things working and up and running) is your day job, you sometimes lose sight of the fact that they're still a lot of fun and can inspire kids to learn a little bit more about the electronic world around them.

We'd booked Charlotte on a coding taster session held in Oxford (you can find out more about the sessions here but there are bound to be sessions also running in your local area if you google around a bit) dabbling in Micro:Python on the BBC Micro:Bit computer.

BBC Computers? Programming? Yep that really took me back to being at school though I'm pretty sure that most of the time during "Computer Club" we ended up playing Elite rather than actually doing anything practical (still love that game).

What came as a bit of a surprise to me was that kids learn Python, a 'proper' programming language - and start to cut their teeth very early on with a scripted language that can actually do things! We've had a few hits and misses playing around with Scratch (which is more like programming with Lego blocks than real scripting) so I was interested to see what the session would be all about.

The BBC Micro:Bit is a small but powerful computer designed to help kids understand what lies at the heart of ordinary everyday objects they might use elsewhere.

The BBC Micro:Bit. Deceptively small but extremely fun to play with!

Basically a circuit board with edge connections and a USB port, a couple of buttons and (the most important bit for Charlotte) a 5 x 5 pixel display, the Micro:Bit interacts with your laptop or PC via USB to allow you to write programs in Python that trigger things to happen on the tiny device.

The taster sessions are quite short - 30 mins - so getting something working in that time can be a bit of a struggle, but thankfully the team were extremely well organised and the kits we used in the class were all ready to go - all we needed to do was turn up.

The taster program was to write a small 'heartbeat' routine. First, kids were shown how to write a program that would activate different lights on the Micro:Bit's display. Again this took me back to my youth, recalling a lot of time writing simple programs to make game 'sprites' on my humble ZX Spectrum. Similar to plotting out a design on graph paper for MineCraft or other block-based things, the Micro:Bit's display can be programmed with your own designs.

The Mu Programming interface. Commands are entered almost in plain English! A heck of a change from working in BBC or ZX Basic!

Using the Mu Programming interface (basically a nice and simple UI for kids who are just breaking away from block-based coding languages), children can write simple routines then "flash" them to the Micro:Bit ready to actually do something.

The device, despite its size, comes with a couple of buttons and a range of other sensors (including accelerometers and a compass) so there are lots of ways to interact with the thing.

During the lesson we were shown how to hook the Micro:Bit up to an external edge connector so that we could then connect in a speaker attached to a breadboard. Again, so many memories of doing this kind of stuff way way back in the 80s but seeing it all updated for today's kids was pretty cool.

Charlotte took to it like a duck to water, and has since asked for a kit for her Birthday (she'd better behave!) It struck me that the combination of having something tangible (the Micro:Bit itself) coupled with a programming language where you're actually doing what I did all those years ago, basically tapping code in painstakingly into an editor was probably what made the session so exciting to her. Seeing an actual result from your programming efforts that makes logical sense really seemed to help the coin drop for her more than our sessions on Scratch (MIT Edu's alternative programming language where kids basically drag and drop components together in order to make program code).

There are Scratch-like editors for the Micro:Bit but Mu (the editor you see in the screenshot above) just felt like it offered a better balance between proper coding and complilation, and having a command set to dip into rather than some fairly rigid 'blocks'.

Once again it looks like the BBC are helping innovation in the important areas of early years technology and computer-based learning just as they did all those years ago.

The only annoyance is that this stuff isn't introduced at Charlotte's school until she's a lot older - yet it's obvious that kids as young as 5 or 6 (or maybe even younger) could have just as much fun with a helping hand or two from geeky mums and dads, doing something that may actually inspire them to get into proper coding and control stuff later in life.

Fantastic fun and we'll be returning for the rest of the sessions without a doubt and as the Micro:Bit is a shade under 20 quid (the Mu editor is free and can be installed on any laptop or PC as long as you've got USB ports to actually flash the program to your Micro:Bit) we'll probably pick one up pretty soon too.

Hooray! Hoorah! It's all the thrill of the circus in Lesley Barnes' gorgeous follow up to "Jill & Dragon"...

Poems! Space! Two of our favourite things combined? Well, this one's going to go down well....

Tomorrow sees the release of two adorable 'lift the flap' books for tiny teeny tots, helping them learn all about their gardens and all the amazing creatures and plants that live there - and underwater, where once again they can learn all about amazing animals and plants.

"Pairs in the Garden" is an explosion of colour, tons of brilliant page spreads and zillions of flaps for little ones to open and reveal.

Lift stones to find snails, grass to find ladybirds and lettuce leaves to find caterpillars, then answer a simple counting question.


"Pairs Underwater" is equally colourful, and full of amazing animals that your little ones will love learning about. Lift the flaps to find the matching pairs in this fun novelty series that's all about habitats!

This book has seven die-cut flaps on every spread for little ones to lift to find the matching pairs and spot the odd one out. Lift stones to find turtles, seaweed to find seahorses and shells to find crabs, then answer a simple counting question.

Both books are printed on sturdy card, perfect for little hands, providing fun and enjoyment while out and about or at home, as well as teaching important recognition and memory skills.

Both titles are released on 2nd February 2017, published by Frances Lincoln Children's Books (kindly sent for review). 

If there's one thing you can be sure of, sticking a pencil into a child's hand and giving them a blank piece of paper is like uttering a magic spell...