Madeline Matters

Earlier this year I read Madeline, a 44-page picturebook written by Ludwig Bemelmans and published in 1939. It’s the tale of eponymous character, Madeline, a little schoolgirl in Paris who becomes ill with appendicitis and has to be rushed from her dormitory for emergency treatment. Madeline recovers in hospital where she is visited by her

A Journey: Past, Present, Future

Journey to Jo’burg by Beverley Naidoo is a children’s historical fiction novel set in South Africa in about 1985. The story is shaped by the 1976 Soweto schoolchildren uprising and is a sensitive portrayal from the viewpoint of a black child, Naledi, of life during apartheid. It situates the reader and its protagonist clearly against

Whose Viewpoint?

In a 2007 springclean I look through some books in my bookcase. The books are Bibles my grandfather, Ronald Abbott, gave me before he died. Nineteen-twenty-seven says the inscription in one, 1941 another. Inside a 1939 ‘Active Services’ edition, published by the Naval & Military Bible Society, London, is a newspaper clipping about Grandpa in