MapHead 2
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Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Poetry (cover illustration by Peter Weevers). Edited by Alison Sage (who also edited The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature), this sumptuous anthology is loosely divided into four sections corresponding to age starting with nursery rhymes and first poems through to poems for older children and classic poetry. Poems from such modern poets as Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope and Maya Angelou sit alongside poems by Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley and Shakespeare. The anthology is illustrated in full colour and black and white. Newly commissioned illustrations from, for example, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes and Nicola Bayley are included alongside illustrations by Randolph Caldecott, Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway. With such a comprehensive range of poems for 2-11 year olds and upwards, this is a wonderful family book.
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MapHead 2
Lesley Howarth's MapHead must count as one of the most original creations in contemporary writing for children and readers who responded to his first manifestation will need little encouragement to become absorbed in this sequel. Depicted as a traveller between 'the obvious world of people' and 'the Subtle World', he finds himself a temporary guest of the 'everyday' Stamp family. His arrival in their lives is to provide material for some hilarious scenes of domestic chaos and, more seriously, for fascinating considerations of childhood (and adult) loneliness, of father-son relationships and, above all, of the nature of power, its uses and abuses. This is an ingenious, multi-faceted novel, shot through with humanity and tenderness.