Noelle’s Treasure Tale
by Gloria Estefan
They don’t come worse than this. It’s hard enough getting beyond the cover, which bills the story as “A new magically mysterious adventure”. What kind of grammar is that? It’s always a mistake to write in verse if you are incompetent as a writer. And this verse is truly awful.
The great american mousical
by Julie Andrews
Writing in tandem with her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, Andrews makes a reasonable stab at invoking the romance and mystique of Broadway to children aged five to nine. You can hear the clipped diction of Mary Poppins in the narration, which describes a subterranean theatre run by mice that mimics the human one on the stage above. The book is evocative and touching.
Whoopi’s big book of manners
by Whoopi Goldberg
The good news is that the film star’s guide to how to behave manages to avoid being sanctimonious. At times it captures Whoopi’s mild eccentricity, with her admonitions to children not to press all the buttons in a lift or her account of the foibles of other cultures. But in other respects it is surprisingly bland. Why does it take Goldberg to tell kids that they should not use cellphones in church or at a restaurant?
The English Roses: too good to be true
by Madonna
Bloated, vapid, frivolous, silly … need I go on? OK, I will, with one last observation: the writing is painfully bad. “Dominic de la Guardia was quite a spiffy dancer, but all eyes were on Miss Fluffernutter. She was dancing like a whirling dervish.” Spiffy? Spiffy?
Is there really a human race?
by Jamie Lee Curtis
Now this is more like it. Lee Curtis has sold four million copies of her seven children’s books, and deserves the success, judging by her latest volume. She came to her publishers, Harper-Collins, 15 years ago because she was drawn to an illustrator published by them, Laura Cornell, and the two have been working well together ever since. Words and pictures support each other — a simple concept but depressingly rare in the world of celebrity books. Lee Curtis dares to enter the gladiator’s ring of verse, and emerges victorious.
High in the Clouds
by Paul McCartney
This is the ultimate vegetarian’s storybook. It takes us to the fabled land of Animalia, where all animals live in freedom and without fear. To underline McCartney’s deep distrust of humanity, he takes us through hideous, tree-less Megatropolis, where animals are used as slave labour. Written with Philip Ardagh, the story has a beginning, middle and end, which is more than some of these books. But it could do with less of the lip service paid to Disney. — Â