Famous with Smokey Joe
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Cover Story
This issue's cover is a photograph of Anne Frank whose diary is discussed by Michael Rosen fifty years after its first publication. Following the arrest of the Frank family and their companions, the secret annex in Amsterdam where they had been in hiding was locked up and everybody forbidden to enter it, since Jewish possessions became Nazi property and were carted away. Before this happened, the young woman, Miep Gies, who had provided those in hiding with food and who had a second key to the annex, risked herself once more by entering it. Miep retrieved Anne's diary from the devastation together with the Frank family photograph album.
Thanks to Penguin Children's Books for help in reproducing this cover.
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Famous with Smokey Joe
Illustrated by Alan Marks
This is an idiosyncratic story about an Afro-Caribbean city boy who strikes up a relationship with an elderly, eccentric and charismatic knife grinder while on a rural break from the children's home in which he lives. Smokey Joe takes Zac on as a temporary apprentice, and as they roam the countryside together, the child's underlying emotional frustrations are mollified by his concern for his new partner, and by the discoveries about life and work and people to which Joe introduces him. At the climax of this earthy, craft-inspired, story is a mythical encounter which lovers of folklore will find enthralling.
