Parents don't have all the answers. That's something both my wife and I have been brutally honest about with our daughter as she grows up, and though we can impart wisdom based on our own experiences, sometimes kids need a little bit more than that - they need to hear from other kids, and some sage advice from experts to help them find their way in an increasing mental and physical minefield as they rapidly approach their teens.

"Fearless" by Liam Hackett, with illustrations by Mike Perry is bang on the nail for my daughter's age group. Liam - founder of the "Ditch the Label" organisation, supporting anti-bullying strategies and working with kids and teens, has curated a fantastic book filled with a ton of advice on a huge range of subjects, mostly dealing with how stereotypes creep into young people's lives at an increasingly early age, and sometimes in the rush to conform or fit in, they lose a little bit of their own identities in the process.

Here then is a book that helps them claw some of that back with tons of amazing anecdotes and case studies from kids like my daughter, ordinary kids who may be dealing with extraordinary situations in work, at home and in their social lives.

Each chapter deals with a particular worry or fear kids might have, from the fear of being yourself, fear of failure, fear of not fitting in or expressing yourself - with plenty of amazing advice from Liam and his team of experts, as well as real life cases - many of which (sadly) my daughter has already encountered as she enters the next phase of her life.

The book is extremely strong on advice surrounding bullying in particular, in whatever form it takes from physical and emotional intimidation through to cyber-bullying and peer pressure, dealt with and discussed in a level-headed and mature way to ensure children do not feel alone in dealing with this nastiness, and giving them plenty of help and advice on who to turn to, and what to do.

This is absolutely superb stuff, it does the things it needs to do without talking down to kids or treating them like they were born yesterday.

"Fearless" by Liam Hackett and Mike Perry is out today, published by Scholastic (kindly supplied for review).

Now and again a children's book comes along that makes you think "Well, that's a new one on me!"

So far I can't recall ever seeing a children's picture book that takes such a quirky, charming and original look at a subject that we go to great pains to avoid.

Death.

In "The End of Something Wonderful" by Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic and George Ermos, a fairly tricky subject is injected with a dose of slightly macabre (some might even say inappropriate) humour to help kids over the loss of a beloved pet.

So far we've managed to avoid this particular part of C's formative growing up, mostly because we don't have any pets or haven't had any. But what happens when a child's best furry (scaly, swimmy, or perhaps even tortoise-shelled) buddy dies?

It's time for a funeral - a right royal send off for the poor little critter. But how, and where do you even start with something like that?


We probably sound a bit down on this, but quite the contrary, and perhaps we find it funnier because we are petless. But it has a dark sense of humour running through the story, something that is sadly missing from children's books. Stephanie's text coupled with George's fantastic illustrations make this a real departure from the staid and boring, and dare we say rather 'safe' choices often made for subject matter when it comes to children's stories.


Sum this book up in a sentence: A quirky, charming if somewhat irreverent look at the loss of a beloved pet, and what to do next, brilliantly realised by an extremely talented pair of creatives.

"The End of Something Wonderful: A Practical Guide to a Backyard Funeral" by Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic and George Ermos is out now, published by Sterling Kids (kindly supplied for review). 

To most people, the name Wu Chien Shiung is completely unknown, but in "Queen of Physics" by Teresa Robeson and Rebecca Huang, it's time to raise the profile of this astonishingly accomplished physicist, rightly placing her name amongst other more well known and easily recognised figures such as Oppenheimer and Fermi.

When Wu Chien Shiung was born in China 100 years ago, girls did not attend school; no one considered them as smart as boys. 

We do love anything that involves masses and masses of stickers. There's definitely something soothing about sticker books but in two new releases from Button Books there's more to the activities within than just stickers.

Let's kick off by taking a closer look at "The Magical Underwater Activity Book" by Mia Underwood.

With a superb underwater theme, chock full of mermaids, mer-cats (did you know there was such a thing? You do now!) and a whole host of familiar and unfamiliar sea creatures, this is perfect for kids who love to imagine what life is like under the waves.

There are plenty of awesome brain-taxing challenges such as word searches, mazes and papercraft.

Perfect for busy little kids, "The Magical Underwater Activity Book" by Mia Underwood is out now, published by Button Books. 

Also out now, the awesome "Roman Adventure Activity Book" by Jen Alliston, for kids who like a bit of history.

There are more stickers (over 100 to be precise) plus a whol host of Roman-themed makes and puzzles, activities and jokes perfect for kids who are covering the Roman Empire in lessons at school.

Kids will learn tons about Roman times while they're tackling all the fun things to do in the book, with brilliant characterful illustrations showing the type of people who lived in Ancient Rome and what they got up to!

"Roman Adventure Activity Book" is also out now, published by Button Books (kindly supplied for review). 

Stories that help children fit in and also demonstrate kindness are much needed right now, in our modern world where it feels like an uphill struggle to help kids develop tolerance, understanding and explore friendships with others.

In "Twelve Days of Kindness" by Cori Brooke, Fiona Burrows, Holly realises that the new girl in her class is struggling to make friends.

With the help of their football coach Holly and Nabila come up with a plan.

Can their school football team bring them together, and expand their friendship group?

As the two friends bond over a common interest, the story beautifully explores how kids can learn the moral at the heart of the story, and even pay it forward in their own lives, at school and at home. The story is gentle but nicely written, with kid-friendly illustrations helping to put the message across effectively.

Sum this book up in a sentence: A great little book for helping kids understand how to make friends outside their own social / cultural circles, and how tolerance, kindness and friendship can make a huge difference when new folk feel uncomfortable and like a fish out of water.

"Twelve Days of Kindness" by Cori Brooke and Fiona Burrows is out now, published by New Frontier Publishing (kindly supplied for review).  

This one's strictly for our YA / Grown Up Readers, sliding into our YA / Adult Graphic Novel of the Week slot with all the temerity and bombast of a well-loved song.

In fact that's the power of comics - that sometimes you re-read something you read as a miscreant youth and it takes you back to the very time, the very era you first read it in.

I read this as a relative youngster, perhaps not as young as the main protagonists (or should that be antagonists?) in "Third World War" by Pat Mills, Carlos Ezquerra, D'Israeli and Angela Kincaid. But young enough to entirely 'get' where this comic was coming from. Created by arguably one of the most important comic writers in Brit-com history and illustrated by a truly iconic comic artist, there was no way on paper that this could fail.

Hailed as a new flagship for intelligent comic readers, Crisis launched in 1988 and caught me on the hop as the sort of disgruntled wage-slave 20 year old unhappy with the way the world was going at the time (Reader: He didn't change, even into his 50s).

In fact that's the rub - the stuff depicted in this comic 30 years ago really hasn't changed much - and the story's streak of malevolent anger feels perhaps even more relevant now than it did back then, and as the young adults drafted into a multinational peace organisation soon find, the machinations of large corporations carving up the natural resources of poorer countries for their own gain hasn't seemingly altered one iota in the here and now of 2020.

The story is mainly told from the perspective of Eve, a girl balancing her strong moral compass against the demands of the peace corps she's 'drafted' into, finding that at every turn her worst fears are realised, and the "third world" is being vastly exploited by the evil multinational known as Multifoods, responsible for pushing sugary junk on the world's consumers, and carving up vast tracts of South America for gain and profit while displacing / policing the indigenous people there.


The young characters in the story, Eve, Paul, Gary, Trish and Ivan, all felt believable in a way that hadn't been tackled in comics for me up to that point. These were folk who I could readily spot amongst friends and acquaintances at the time and characters that were drawn from the disaffected youth fed up to the back teeth with a decade of the Tory government at the time (yeah, about that "not much has changed but we live underwater" thing).

While I was mainlining music by The The, Depeche Mode, Warren Zevon etc, I was also reading this comic and (largely) ignoring "New Statesman" (the other launch story in Crisis - which felt like it was catering for the US market rather than us) in favour of Third World War.

Paul, Ivan, Eve, Gary and Trish - In the firing line for Multifoods Peace Volunteer Force

It's surprising how well this has held up, and it's also surprising just how pissed off I still am at the way it draws to a close, leaving things hanging in an almost painful way, though obviously you can draw your own conclusions as to how things would've spun out if Crisis hadn't folded after three all-too-short years, ruling out a return for this strip.

As it stands though it's still one heck of a timely piece of work, read now amongst a world now paying the piper for what was going on 30 years ago as the climate crisis bares its teeth and bites hard, wreaking havoc around the world, and poorer countries still find themselves exploited by huge multinationals like the fictional Multifoods, adopting far more nefarious practices than just sending a bunch of conscript kids into hot zones. Spellbinding, important and thoroughly absorbing stuff.

Sum this book up in a sentence: A mind-crushingly timely slice of chaos 30 years ahead of its time, ringing a 5-bell alarm about what multinationals were doing to the planet, the effects of which we're still feeling today.

"Third World War (Crisis)" by Pat Mills, Carlos Ezquerra, D'Israeli and Angela Kincaid is out now, published by Rebellion (kindly supplied in digital format for review). 

We're unapologetic Star Wars nerds here at ReadItDaddy Towers and now we're all caught up with the latest blockbuster movie "The Rise of Skywalker" it's time to dip into a book of the week par excellence, particularly if you love cool concept art and gorgeous vehicle designs.

"The Moviemaking Magic of Star Wars: Ships & Battles" by Landry Walker draws together an enviable collection of material from right across the Star Wars cinematic and TV universes (though it's not quite up to date enough to encompass the glorious "The Mandalorian" show on Disney Plus).

That said, this is a fantastic guide to all the amazing ships and climactic battles that have been such a huge part of turning Star Wars into such a cultural phenomenon.

From the earliest movies, and some of the groundbreaking designs that turned wide eyed little kids like me into real fans back in the 1970s, bang up to date with the latest trilogy (and yeah the prequels are in here too, bless 'em) there's just about everything you'll need to know about X-Wings, Tie Fighters, the mighty Millennium Falcon, those romping stomping AT-ATs and many, many more iconic ships and vehicles.


Unusually, the book also has 'lift the flap' sections that show the evolution of certain designs from concept to finished models or CGI renders.


Though the books (rightly) celebrate the amazing work of concept artist Ralph McQuarrie (the late designer and concept artist who is often credited with creating the distinct look and feel of Star Wars), I was delighted to also find Joe Johnston's original and far more industrial designs for ships and vehicles being beautifully showcased in this fantastic book, alongside Doug Chiang's concept work too. Very much hoping that we get to see more books in the series (particularly if there are any planned titles about costumes, scenery and stuff like that).

For process nerds and concept art fans in general this is an essential tome, detailing and showing the way movie designs evolve, with some truly fantastic anecdotes and stories from those closest to the movies, and the directors (George Lucas of course, Irving Kershner, Ron Howard, JJ Abrams etc.) who brought those visions to life on screen.

Sum this book up in a sentence: Brilliant for a range of ages, even old Star Wars geeks like me, this is absolutely unmissable stuff.

"The Moviemaking Magic of Star Wars: Ships and Battles" by Landry Walker is out now, published by Abrams (kindly supplied for review). 

Despite the grand sounding name, "ReadItDaddy Towers" isn't the capacious book-filled mansion you'd probably picture.

In fact we are constantly fighting a (mostly losing) battle against a flood of books - not just the stuff we get sent for review, but our own personal books (yes, amazing isn't it, book bloggers actually buy books as well, who'd have thunk it!)

Now, this isn't some braggy post celebrating the fact that we have a lot of books. It wasn't always that way, and as a kid from a tough working-class upbringing who was once in the position of only getting books that were either donated free from libraries or schools, or hand-me-downs and books scavenged from jumble sales, I can honestly tell you that getting rid of books even now feels like a painful sting.

Before Christmas we had a massive book cull, probably the biggest to date. We had several reasons for doing so (other than the fact that our book-cases now visibly 'bow' under the weight of the 'keepers').

We had got to a point where C's bookcases in her room were filled with books that we all loved, but never read any more. Taking some Marie Kondo-style advice, we thought it was best to donate these to worthy causes, let other kids have a chance to love them as much as we had over the years.

And so the great book cull began.

I almost needed tranquillisers as the first piles began to form. My wife is far more merciless than me, and has absolutely no qualms about putting books into the 'donate' pile that I wouldn't dream of getting rid of. Books that we'd kept and loved since C was a tiny baby. Many books we'd read to her at bedtimes again and again. Books by authors we've loved and still love. Even some books that were signed or annotated. Nothing was spared. I basically sat in a semi-curled up ball rocking on my haunches and let Mrs ReadIt get on with it.

Two musings emerged from this exercise:

1) Never ever EVER trust a book blogger / instagrammer / influencer who shows you photos of their shelves looking utterly pristine, beautifully organised, regimentally colour-sorted and even sorted by author / genre / publisher. These folk are not normal. They are the blogging equivalent of those folk who constantly take photos of their meal when out to dinner. They are some sort of alien android, sent to this earth to torment more chaotically minded folk like us. I am utterly convinced of this.

2) The whole exercise took days. This wasn't because of the actual business of removing books from shelves and creating donation piles. It was mostly from me sighing heavily, clutching each of the former 'keepers' to my chest, cherishing the memories that these books invoked just by a glance at the covers, and of course reading them one last time.

So now our bookcases are a tiny bit emptier but once again they're slowly filling up (I mean book tokens and christmas money = more books, right? And you're duty-bound to keep books you've shelled out your own hard-earned cash on, also right?)

Even though we ended up with a donation pile way in excess of around 300-400 books, we still don't seem to have clawed back that much space (though for the first time in a long while our books are no longer 'double stacked' two layers deep, and new titles slide into the meagre number of gaps fairly easily without having to be hammered home with a lump hammer, which is nice!)

All the culled books went to charitable causes. Some were sold in aid of local charities, but the majority were donated freely to folk who find themselves in the position I was once in, unable to afford gorgeous books or just having a small selection of secondhand books at home.

After ten years of book blogging we know just how vital books are in a child's life so being able to pay it forward in even a fairly small way feels damned good and satisfying, even if the pain of book culling is almost too much to bear for book obsessives like us.

It's a little-known fact that the late Professor Stephen Hawking and his daughter Lucy Hawking wrote a series of fantastic children's books with an inquisitive character named George delving into the mysteries of science, time and space.

We're also delighted to find that "Unlocking the Universe" by Stephen and Lucy is finally finding its way into print in a new hardbacked edition from Puffin, out today and absolutely crammed with astonishing information about our humble planet, and the Universe beyond.

Perfectly pitched at inquisitive kids who love science, the book engages their curiosity, posing big questions such as "What would it have been like to walk on our ancient earth, four and a half billion years ago?" (the answer, quite hot as it was almost a fluid lava-filled landscape with very little life to speak of). 

The effects of global warming on our planet are examined in great detail here

A hilarious fish out of water tale, meet "The Caveman Next Door" by Tom Tinn-Disbury!