There's a Hippopotamus on our roof eating cake
Hazel Edwards
My daddy says there's a hole in our roof. I know why there's a hole. There's a hippopotamus on our roof eating cake.' This classic story about one of the largest and most famous imaginary friends has been delighting children around the world now for 30 years.
http://bit.ly/jjjXT0 for more on the book, the trailer and fiction activities for the book
The Dream of the Thylacine
Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks
This arresting and beautiful picture book from Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks is a shimmering encounter with the Tasmanian tiger, a lament for a lost species, and a compelling evocation of the place of animals in Nature.
For more about the book plus acess Curriculum notes => http://bit.ly/mxTf4p
Doodleday
by Ross Collins
Mom has just one thing to tell Harvey on Doodleday--no drawing allowed! But surely drawing one little fly can't hurt. Not until Harvey's fly comes to life and starts to wreck the kitchen, that is! What can Harvey draw that will catch it? A spider! But the spider proves to be even more trouble. Only one thing is capable of stopping Harvey's rampaging doddles...Mom!
Activities for Doodleday at http://bit.ly/kYiCrd
I have just put together a page for Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer - with this synopsis, a trailer and a package of links to more than 20 fiction activities for the book. You can visit it here => http://bit.ly/luVDdz 
Twelve-year-old villain, Artemis Fowl, is the most ingenious criminal mastermind in history. His bold and daring plan is to hold a leprechaun to ransom. But he's taking on more than he bargained for when he kidnaps Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon (Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance Unit). For a start, leprechaun technology is more advanced than our own. Add to that the fact that Holly is a true heroine and that her senior officer Commander Root will stop at nothing to get her back and you've got the mother of all sieges brewing!
On the heels of earning an Oscar nom for co-writing "The Kids Are All Right," Lisa Cholodenko is in negotiations to direct a live-action adaptation of the children's picturebook "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" for 20th Century Fox. => http://bit.ly/lI7QCN
The work of Shaun Tan, the Australian children’s book illustrator, recalls Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton, but with a mature sad-humored control. It’s a tone that pervades The Lost Thing, an animated adaptation of Tan’s 1999 book of the same name, which won an Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards. It’s the tale of a young man in a post-industrial landscape who discovers a neglected many-tentacled playful cyborg on a beach. This month, that and two of his other older children’s books, The Red Tree (2001), a meditation on loneliness, and the John Marsden-authored The Rabbits (1998), an allegory for the plight of the Aborigine, are enjoying a wide release in America in a one-book compendium Lost and Found: Three by Shaun Tan. These are the kinds of children’s books over which you obsess over the details of the pages’ margins.
Tan, who lives in Melbourne, answered some questions by email. => http://bit.ly/mL2dXc
Morris Gleitzman at the launch of his new book, Too Small to Fail at The Little Bookroom in Melbourne last night.
Morris Gleitzman at the launch of Too Small to Fail
The Treasure Island author's fairytales are finally to be published in one set, as he intended
Robert Louis Stevenson lived out his last years on a Samoan island. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
The literary betrayal of one of the most popular writers in the English language, Robert Louis Stevenson, is to be avenged in the first collected edition of the great Scottish writer's little-known Samoan fairytales. => http://bit.ly/eNcyY4
The Going to Bed Book
(Board book)
By Sandra Boynton
And for a little one who is reluctant to go to bed, sometimes a silly book is just the ticket. And when it comes to silly books, Sandra Boynton is the undisputed queen. In The Going to Bed Book, an ark full of animals watches the sun go down and then prepares for bed.
Go to http://bit.ly/kMErxi for more about the book and to watch the trailer.
“What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, eerily foreshadowing a critical question in the age of digital media, “without pictures or conversations?”
Soon enough, she plunges down the rabbit hole and finds pictures and conversations aplenty. But her question lingers for us today in modified form. With electronic books — a technology teeming with children’s titles, many of them stunningly rendered for the Apple iPad — mere pictures and conversations are passé, at least pictures that don’t move and conversations that you can’t hear. Nobody has to feel sleepy or stupid anymore, not with a fully charged iPad with a book on it. => http://nyti.ms/iXddyt
