 Hi everyone, my name is Steph, this is Little Bookish Teacher and welcome or welcome back to my channel. Today I'm really excited to share some recent releases from Alan and Unwin. I did receive all of these books for review so thank you very much to the publisher for sending them to me. We have a mixture of picture books and junior fiction and middle grade titles. There are a couple of graphic novels in here so there's a huge variety of things that came out at the very end of January and I'm so excited to share them with you. We're going to go in read a ship category order so we're going to start with picture books, then junior fiction, then middle grade titles. So the first book that we're going to talk about is Hope is the Thing by Johanna Bell and illustrated by Erika Wagner. This is a beautiful, beautiful picture book all about Australian birds. While I was reading the little reference sheet that comes from the publishers they were saying that this book was inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem which is called Hope is the Thing with Feathers and you can definitely see sort of the inspiration of that through the story. So this is a book that really does celebrate the idea of hope and each page features a different bird and a different way of thinking about hope and what hope actually is. So it is an absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous picture book. The illustrations are just stunning. Just have a look at this, all of these beautiful Australian birds. It's a beautiful celebration of the imagination of young children really feeling a sense of wonder for the world and about maintaining that wonder and that sense of hope in our world. So absolutely gorgeous. I also received two Olly and Bee books. These are actually graphic novels. They're full-color graphic novels for younger readers. There is Bunny Ideas and Otterly Ridiculous and these are about Olly and Bee who are an owl and a rabbit and they're best friends but they don't always get on and in both these stories disagreements occur between them and their friends and they have to find ways to overcome it. All of the situations are very reminiscent of situations that young children find themselves in like one person dominating the game ideas market and you know forcing their friends to play their games even when everyone else is starting to get a little bit annoyed and how they overcome that and it's really really lovely. I mean these are perfect for exploring those ideas with children especially sort of in that foundation to year-to-age category. There's also a huge amount of humor in here. Renee Tramell who is the author and illustrator has used animal puns the whole way through the book and that does make it a lot of fun to explore and unpack and would even be a way of using with slightly older audiences as well to unpack how language has been used effectively to create those puns in these stories. There is a whole series of these books. These are the first two that I've read so I'm very grateful that I have now had a chance to explore them. I also received the fourth book in the pow pow pig series by Anne Doe. This one is illustrated by Peter Chong and this one has a bit of a crossover with Ninja Kid which is one of the Ando series that I have not read yet but pow pow pig and associates have found themselves in the past. They are the Z team so they were all training to be you know heroes and they fell a little bit short and they've got the task of trying to save the world and they are travelling back in time to try and get to the right moment in history except they keep ending up in the wrong time. In this instance they end up in 1845 and they must rescue the Loch Ness monster and Ninja Kid does make an appearance in this one so what is very fun is very entertaining and I loved the take on the Loch Ness monster. It was just really really fun and a really great starting point to actually have a conversation with kids about things like the Loch Ness monster and history because it is explored in a really fun way in this book. So Ando's series continue to be those serial stories that kids will just want to keep picking up over and over again because they're fun, they're fast paced and there's a lot of use of text and changing the size of text and the fonts and all of the illustrations on all of the pages make it really engaging to read. And then finally I have Tumble Glass by Kate Constable which is a middle grade title. This is a time slip novel which means the characters go back in time and in this one we have two sisters, Rowan and Ash and they're painting Ash's room one day and then suddenly they find themselves in 1999 but when Rowan comes back to the present day she realizes that her sister has not come back and so it is a race against time for her to keep traveling back in time to get enough of the pieces in order to bring her sister home. In this one Rowan travels back not just to 1999 but also to the 1900s to 1943 and to 1972. She learns things about World War II, she learns about the land rights movement here in Australia and all the while she is trying to collect clues and pieces of her family's history along with artifacts that will help anchor herself to bring her sister back home and she's helped along the way by a neighbor who may or may not be magic and may or may not be hundreds of years old. But it was really fun and very entertaining and kind of different from a lot of middle grade novels that I've read recently. I also loved that it explored family and what family means and different family makeups as well and there's a whole lot of other side characters that we meet along the way and their stories are all very interesting. There is something mentioned at the end that leads me to believe that you know if Kate Constable decides she could write another story with one of the side characters which would be very interesting but on its own this is a complete story. It is about the bonds of sisterhood and family and believing a little bit in magic at the same time and how important a place can be to people. So yes those are some recent releases and reads for me from Alan and Unwin. So thank you very much again to them for sending them to me. I will leave them all linked down below if you want to check them out in more detail. I do have one more review from the stack of books that they sent me which was a young dot title. That will be a separate video coming out very soon so stay tuned for that. Otherwise in the comments I'd love to know what is a recent kids or middle grade release that you have been really excited about. Otherwise I hope that we're here on the world just staying safe and healthy and I will see you in my next video. Thanks so much for watching. Bye everyone.