It is the season for parents to be frantically looking around for beautiful books to gift their children. A beautiful book over the holiday season is always a treasure. I thought I would put together a list of stunning and extremely giftable books for children, from Jonathan Ball Publishers, that we have been reading lately.
Mazes for Bright Sparks
The mazes start off simply enough and get trickier and trickier throughout the book, I am thinking the middle grade crowd would really enjoy them. There is a little introduction to different kinds of mazes and then you are free to go and find your joy… there is a handy little spot on each page to write the time you took to travel through your maze. Classic fun times for youngsters… it is all good.
Maths Games for Bright Sparks
All my kids gravitated to this book and took it for a spin, just like the maze book but packed with quick and easy, and not so easy… math games. 83 challenges of all types and good for all ages as well… grids to fill in, hide and seek, chains to follow, codes to figure out. Put on your thinking caps and have some fun.
Absolutely Everything
This book was grabbed as it entered the front door and Hood 8, age 11 vanished into his den for several hours, before emerging and announcing his review in a word: FANTASTIC. There you go, need I say more…
To be honest, I was hooked in the forward, when he explains how dirty camping dishes led him to write this book. I love the big chunky feel of the book, it certainly matches the theme of a book about everything… not to mention the classical illustrations and feel of the pages. The illustrations are great, from tables to photographs, great paintings to quotations… this book is perfect for a young at heart history buff… There is also glossary and an index, which immediately turned it into a real book for my young historian.
This book is a history of the world from the proposed Big Bang Theory, through a swamp of dinosaurs, via the ancient civilisations and the miserable middle ages, via the world wars and marching on to the present day. It is a fifteen chapter romp through time, sweeping through massive topics in a very readable way.
And there is a video series to go with it: A Pocket Full of History… The author, Christopher Lloyd, has this amazing coat of many pockets… and he gets “professional” pick pockets to help him tell his story.
Draw Kawaii in 5 Simple Steps
This is cuteness on point, step by step pictures to draw… this is really the art of turning simple lines into the cutest little Kawaii pictures… if you ever wanted your vegatables to have cute faces, or to draw a fluffy llama, then this is the wat to go. From owls, to pizza slices, from foxes to toadstools… thirty double pages of drawings to try out, on lovely sturdy paper that will definitely withstand the onslaught of a young marker artist. This book is fun and perfect for summer holiday downtime.
Pirate Stew
This is a pirate story, the best kind of story when you live with a young pirate. It is a large format picture book, written in rhyme about tow kids whose parents go out for dinner (obviously before 2020!), and the children are left with a baby sitter… only the babysitter is a pirate… and as soon as their parents left… the whole pirate crew arrives. This is a romp of a read…
But Chris Riddell’s detailed illustrations are so detailed and so complete, one feels like one is reading through a pirate reference book… and our young pirate was immediately inspired to add a few more pirates to his pirate sketch book.
My kids are besotted, in a good way, with Chris Riddell, they spent a morning with him a couple of years ago and he even included some of them in one of his books.
This book is definitely one to add to our Chris Riddell illustrated books, so many hours of careful study of the illustrations, and the perfect words by Neil Gaiman make a fabulous story and great for bedtime and drifting off to sleep…
Quidditch Through the Ages
This book is a work of art… a glorious and wonderful Encyclopaedia of all things Quidditch… this is the book of books, filled with incredible illustrations, letters, artefacts, and masterpieces. It is packed with clues, so that mere muggles might learn more about the sport. This is the book of all books and a magnificent production.
There are details that you might never have imagined before, it includes a whole chapter on ancient broom games, everything you need to know about the Golden Snitch, and details about teams from all over the world.
Obviously, my kids are mad Potter fans and have each inhaled the series, well this masterpiece of a book is definitely going to had fuel to their fanaticism. Also the illustrations and artwork, not to mention all the details in the beautiful putting together of this book by one of our all time favourites, Emily Gravett. My kids met Emily Gravett more than a few years ago, and they love and adore her and her work. There is no end to the magic that she is able to produce, and we love it all.
Amazon Affiliate Links for Books Mentioned in This Post
Thank you to Jonathan Ball Publishers for supplying this fabulous collection of books for review purposes. This is not a sponsored post and all the opinions are as usual my own.