No catches, no fine print just unconditional book loving for your children with their favourites saved to their own digital bookshelf.
New members get entered into our monthly draw to win £100 to spend in your local bookshop plus lots lots more...
Find out moreChrissie Gittins was born in Lancashire and lives in south London. She worked as an artist and teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She has been shortlisted twice for the CLPE Poetry Award, her poems have been animated for CBeebies and included in many anthologies. She visits schools, libraries and book festivals across the UK. Her previous poetry books include The Humpback's Wail and Stars in Jars, which was a Scottish Poetry Library recommendation for 2014. Paul Bommer is an illustrator, printmaker and graphic designer. His many international clients include the Guardian, Harrods and Virgin, and he exhibits his work across the UK. He was the illustrator for The Humpback's Wail, by Chrissie Gittins.
A wonderfully innovative collection bursting with energy, you can’t help but read with a smile. Chrissie Gittins is on a mission to save words from extinction, with forty exuberant and informative poems to celebrate amazing animals, birds and plants. The imagery is joyful; adders dance, beetroot paint your kitchen, and melons have an annual party, whilst Paul Bommer’s entertaining illustrations make the poems zing off the page. This is Gittins at her very best, playing with style and composition, and writing with zeal. Also check out BBC1 Countryfile on Sunday 22nd October for an interview with poet Chrissie Gittins. Chrissie is being filmed at the North Cornwall Book Festival talking about her latest children’s poetry collection ‘Adder, Bluebell, Lobster’. The book takes 40 of the 110 nature words deleted from the Oxford Junior Dictionary as titles for new poems.
A wonderfully innovative collection bursting with energy, you can’t help but read with a smile. Chrissie Gittins is on a mission to save words from extinction, with forty exuberant and informative poems to celebrate amazing animals, birds and plants. The imagery is joyful; adders dance, beetroot paint your kitchen, and melons have an annual party, whilst Paul Bommer’s entertaining illustrations make the poems zing off the page. This is Gittins at her very best, playing with style and composition, and writing with zeal. Also check out BBC1 Countryfile on Sunday 22nd October for an interview with poet Chrissie Gittins. Chrissie is being filmed at the North Cornwall Book Festival talking about her latest children’s poetry collection ‘Adder, Bluebell, Lobster’. The book takes 40 of the 110 nature words deleted from the Oxford Junior Dictionary as titles for new poems.
These twenty-two cleverly linked stories, written over two decades, trace a life from childhood to middle age. Beginning in Lancashire in the '60s and '70s, they follow a young girl as she becomes aware of what it means to be a daughter, a sister, a lover and a woman in a family where the relationships are constantly changing. From a disappeared clutch of curlew's eggs to the last piece of furniture left standing in a home, these bleak and funny stories bolster what is lost into poignant narratives; told with lyricism, economy and wit, they are observed with the unflinching eye of an incisive witness. Most of them carry an insidiously discomforting charge. She writes about the banalities of daily life, but not for easy comedy. Observing the small things that are significant to people, she shows how her characters are essentially alone. NICHOLAS CLEE The Guardian on Family Connections; She's like a female Alan Bennett, such is the power of her observation. ZOE KING on Family Connections; It's the polished laconic storytelling - and the way this combines with the subject matter, which is often profoundly sad, even painful - but never flat, never gloomy, never depressing. Chrissie Gittins has a real voice and it comes out with the apparent effortlessness which is the mark of finished writing. HELEN DUNMORE on Family Connections; Chrissie Gittins is a real writer with a bleak, accurate and often very funny take on the drab lives most of us lead. Above all she understands the brutal economy you need for a really successful short story... NIGEL WILLIAMS on Family Connections; By turns incisive and funny. Not unlike Oscar Wilde, Professor Heger's Daughter is a feast for the mind. ROBERT PEAKE in Poetry Salzburg Review.
A wonderful collection of new poems and old favourites, some funny and some serious, by a talented children's poet. Covering almost two decades of Chrissie Gittins's best work, this collection will appeal to anyone who loves words and what they can do. With charming line illustrations by Calef Brown, this is a delightful selection to get children thinking, reading and rhyming.
If this is your author page then you can share your Twitter updates with your readers right here on LoveReading
Find out moreIf this is your author page then you can share your Facebook updates with your readers right here on LoveReading
Find out more
Check out the latest activities in our KidsZone.
NEW INDIE AND SELF PUBLISHED BOOK REVIEW AND PROMOTION SERVICE LAUNCHED!