For Payal Kapadia's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
"Nurk," Ursula Vernon, Harcourt; 2008; 131 pp. What makes "Nurk" such a readable little tale? There's nothing tingly and new about an adventure story in which the hero is a reluctant adventurer. A quiet homebody finds himself thrown into a situation where he must display ...
"The Prison Runner," Deborah Ellis, OUP; 2008; 190 pp. A wobbly tooth, a favorite library book that has been lent out to someone else — these are the sorts of problems that children should be growing up with. But life isn't the same everywhere, and ...
'Young Samurai — The Way of the Warrior' By Chris Bradford; Puffin; 2008; 316 pp. This one's especially for you. A hero bred in Japan on Bushido, the sacred way of the samurai. A deadly ninja with one green eye. The picturesque setting of Kyoto, way ...
"The Roar," Emma Clayton, Chickenhouse; 2008; 473 pp. 'The sun was setting over the Atlantic and as it ran like molten gold into the waves, a girl in a Pod Fighter ripped through the scene, like graffiti sprayed across a landscape painting, and for a ...
"The Bomb" Theodore Taylor, Harcourt; 2007; 195pp. Theodore Taylor's "The Bomb" is a very readable history lesson, quite unlike anything you might have been taught at school about the United States' early experimentation with atomic warfare, way back in the mid-1940s. You might already know ...
"Three Good Deeds," Vivian Vande Velde, Harcourt; 2007; 147pp. When Howard taunts an old lady living near Goose Pond in the tiny village of Dumphrey's Mill, what does that make him? It makes him a prankster; a boy whose parents obviously haven't taught him to ...
"The Devil's Breath," David Gilman, Puffin Books; 2007; 377 pp. Close on the heels of Charlie Higson's highly successful Young Bond series comes another adrenalin-pumping adventure story that reads like a Robert Ludlum thriller tailor-made for teenagers. It kicks off explosively with our young hero, ...
"The Boyhood of Burglar Hill," Allan Ahlberg, Puffin Books; 2006; 181 pp. What I like best, yes most of all In my whole life, is kicking a ball Those are a couple of lines from author Allan Ahlberg's "Heard It in the Playground" (1989), a ...
"Tunnels," By Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams, Chicken House; 2007; 463 pp. Books that lead to sequels are good news and bad news bundled into one. Good news because a sequel means that there's more where this came from, and bad news because the ...
"The Great American Mousical," Julie Andrews Edwards, Puffin Books; 2006; 133 pp. If you don't know who Julie Andrews is, ask your parents. They'll tell you how Andrews, the star actress of movie classics like "Mary Poppins" and "The Sound of Music," brought cinema ...
