Children’s Book Week Day 3

flying machine

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Read any good children’s books recently? Stuck for ideas?  Well, this week is your big chance to hop around the world in search of good reads for kids.  You may even win copies, too!   Children’s Book Week is a celebration of the best books for children. 

Every day this week I’ll be posting here, talking about my books, my characters and other books that inspired me.   There will also be some extra activities and on every post there will be a link to my Giveaway.  You can enter some of the options every day you visit.

George and the flying machine

All the characters in my books, The Princelings of the East and the rest of the series, are guinea pigs.  They have a complex world, live in castles and other communities and have work, school and all the usual things ‘people’ do. They are based on my real guinea pigs, the first of whom were Fred and George.

I keep my guinea pigs indoors in a cage, but in the summer, and mild weather, I put them out in runs on the grass.  I call them my lawn-mowing squad, and Fred, George, Victor and Hugo were so diligent I didn’t have to mow around my vegetable patches all summer.  The guinea pigs I have at present don’t seem to do nearly such a neat job!

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One thing that amused me was the way George (on the right in the picture above) would look up and follow the track of any light aircraft, including a vintage biplane, that went over the garden.  I’m sure he couldn’t see it; maybe it was the particular sound that it made.  It gave me the idea that he might enjoy experimenting with flying in the books though.Flying machne at 7HI was thinking of other children’s books that feature aeroplanes or flying.  This is where I’m at a disadvantage because I don’t have experience of an extensive range of more recent children’s books. I can think of The Adventures of TinTin, and of course the Biggles stories by Captain W E Johns, but they are probably considered old-fashioned and non-pc now.  I loved the film of TinTin – did you see it?  What did you like best?

What other books do you like that have aeroplanes or other flying objects – excluding brooms, thestrals, flying cars and portkeys!

Tomorrow’s post will be about Hugo, or do I mean Mariusz? The mystery guinea pigs!

Things to do

PlaneSketch for colouringToday there is a colouring page for you.  This is the master sketch for the picture of George flying his machine with Fred as the passenger that appears on the back of the Trilogy paperback. Thank you to my cover illustrator, Danielle English, for providing it for us.  You might like to see more of her work here.  Right-click it to ‘save image’ and download the picture file to your own device.  It should print full size on letter paper or A4 for colouring in.  You’ll have to be neat to get Fred and George’s features!

Enter my Giveaway

KL Giveaway

Thanks to Mother Daughter Book Reviews and Youth Literature Reviews I’m taking part in a worldwide promotion, the Kid Lit Giveaway Hop. My Giveaway is part of that.

The prizes are:

  • one copy of the Princelings Trilogy (paperback) to a winner in the EU (plus Norway and Switzerland)
  • a bundle of the first three ebooks (as pictured) for a winner elsewhere in the world.
  • one copy of my latest ebook The Talent Seekers (or another of the series if preferred) to a winner (worldwide)

It’s open now and it will close at midnight 19th May (New York time). Click the Kid Lit Giveaway button above to enter – and you can enter every day!

Even more – you can go to other blogs with more books and competitions! Let’s go hopping…

Click here to find more participants and view this Linky Tools list.

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