Wednesday 8 June 2011

June 2011: our first meeting and our first book

Thanks to everyone who came to our first meeting at Bath Library this morning: it was great to meet you all!  I loved sharing such vivid memories of the books we all read as children, or that we remembered being read to us, as well as getting some great ideas for new books to try.

This month we are reading The Family from One End Street, written and illustrated by Eve Garnett, which tells the story of the Ruggles who live at the heart of the fictional town of Otwell.  When first published in 1937 it became only the second ever winner of the Carnegie Medal for Children's Literature, beating J R R Tolkien's The Hobbit to the prize, amongst others.   In 2007 it was selected by the Carnegie judges as one of the ten most important children's novels of the past 70 years.



Garnett wrote two sequels: The Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street which was published in 1956, and The Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn, published in 1962.

For anyone interested in pairing books to read for comparisons, Jacqueline Wilson's Bed and Breakfast Star (2006) or Sue Townsend's The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 and Three Quarters (1982) could prove interesting choices.

See you all on Wednesday 6 July!

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