As Gabriela Mistral’s poem reminded us of other books, so this book reminds us of Joyce Lankester Brisley’s Milly Molly Mandy. It is a very readable account of the day to day adventures of Tamarita and her little sister. It allows daily life in Ecuador, on the other side of the world, to become immediately…

  On the thread of award winners we move to the Nobel Prize for Literature and the poet Gabriela Mistral and her poem Those who do not dance. The children identified immediately with the topic from two books we have read numerous times, Dreamwalking by South African author Bettine Schouw and Giraffes can’t dance by…

  Our journey has taken us from a school librarian in Lima to the editor of the only newspaper of the Falklands to a creative Argentine collage artist; now we are in the hands of a Hans Christian Anderson award winner – Brazilian – Ana Maria Machado and her mystery translated by Lusia Baeta. The…

So this is a double bonanza of a book – gorgeously unique illustrations and witty humour and originality of story. Oh yes it is the eons old desire to fly, mixed with Captain Arsenio’s head firmly in the clouds; and an unshakeable faith in each invention, that cooks up an interesting recipe for some unusual…

From the Peruvian Andes to an archipelago on the Patagonian shelf and a book written by Lisa Watson, the editor of the islands only newspaper, Penguin News. It is also from a very old fashioned cloth handmade book to our first Kindle read (hence the shocking quality of the pic). We are still in the…

I have spent a dark stormy afternoon and evening updating the book list. Wow only 46 days to go before the project kicks off. The children are intrigued by some of the interesting sounding titles we have uncovered. I have not told them we also have plenty of blank countries without a single recommendation!!! Trusting…

So after deciding we would take recommendations from peoples and countries we have just rewritten our list. Apologies for any offence caused by us separating out a “people” from a “nation”. Trusting we have done it sensitively enough to resonate with the general view 😉 We have also renamed countries and territories etc to their…

The children and I have been talking again and are thinking that we will also consider a “people” as one of the 180 books we are looking for. Coming from a country with 11 official languages (I know…) we really do understand how many different groups of people can share the same country. If the…