Hetty the Yeti

Review also includes:

The Mean Team from Mars, ***, Scoular Anderson, 978-0713664362

Duncan and the Pirates, ***, Peter Utton, 978-0713667387

Brick-a-Breck, ***, Julia Donaldson, ill. Philippe Dupasquier, 978-0713664416

Told partly with text and partly in cartoon format (complete with speech bubbles), Hetty the Yeti is a delightful story of how Hetty and her friends set out to try to find a cure for Hetty’s baby brother. They brave a long journey, cold water, and most frightening of all, a Hydra. Shulman’s illustrations are great fun and she knows well how to captivate her readers with this combination of text and picture. There is just the right amount of material in the story to keep the reader turning the pages until things are sorted out. Great fun.

In The Mean Team from Mars we meet Rory who is a keen fan of Arden United football club – but he keeps on getting into trouble on the pitch. Enter a man who sells him a duvet cover at the market with surprising results, for Rory is whisked off to Arden one hundred years in the future. Simply told, this book will be an enjoyable read for any child who likes football.

Colour pictures and straightforward text make Duncan and the Pirates another fun to read story. Mr Hipstone is a grim faced pirate with a soppy dog called Duncan. But are these two characters really as they seem? The pictures lend credibility to the story, which once again is just the right length for a child who has begun to enjoy reading.

Brick-a-Breck stars a boy who loves cereal and spends most of his meal times eating different types. A television advertisement where there are rather too many takes for the good of our hero’s stomach is one of the results of him winning a competition on the back of a packet of cereal, but one of the other results is a surprise that will amuse any child reading the book. Dupasquier captures the humour of the story very well with the facial expressions of the characters in the story. A welcome addition to the library whether at school or elsewhere.