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Joanne Owen - Editorial Expert

Joanne Owen is a writer, reviewer and workshop presenter whose lifelong love of books began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, Wales. An early passion for culture, story and folklore led her to read archaeology and anthropology at St John’s, Cambridge, after which she led the UK children’s book team for a major international retailer, going on to market books for Bloomsbury, Macmillan, Walker Books, Nosy Crow and Rough Guides. She now divides her time between writing, travel writing, reviewing and hosting writing workshops.

Joanne is the author of several books for children and young adults, among them the Martha Mayhem series, the Carnegie Medal-nominated Puppet Master, and You Can Write Awesome Stories, a how-to guide to creative writing. She’s also worked on a major community story project for the National Literacy Trust (Story Quest), and a number of travel guides, including The Rough Guide to Responsible Wales and guidebooks to the Caribbean region. In additional, she’s an occasional chair of LoveReading LitFest events, and judge for the 2023 Branford Boase Award.

Latest Features By Joanne Owen

Witchy words and potent potion poems - writing activities inspired by witches

Word-themed walks on the wild side - taking creative inspiration from enjoying autumn in the great outdoors.

The Best YA Books About Friendship

Get Creative and Create Powerful Poems to Cheer your Friends and Family

View All

Latest Reviews By Joanne Owen

Glowing with lunar loveliness in the form of an aptly-named heroine, and an aptly-named dragon called Spark, Liz Flanagan’s The Moonlight Dragon is perfectly pitched with just the right amount of peril for its intended 8+-year-old audience. Wonderfully atmospheric, we first meet Luna as the full moon rises above a hill, where a stone circle stood “like a ring of giants turned to rock”. Within the circle, longing for her missing mother to return, as she does every month, Luna feels safe. And then she spies the impossible: a beautiful dragon diverting a ... View Full Review

Sizzling with questions of trust and lust through a thrusting plot that fans of gothic romantasy are sure to binge on, Charlotte B. Plumb’s Reap and Sow debut is atmospheric and arresting from the off. Readers are immediately plunged into Blackbridge, where Eda and her brothers manage the family business, Shaws’ Antiques and Curiosities. But this is no ordinary curiosity shop: “Whenever the shop bell chimed, Eda liked to guess: had they come to trade with their coin or their soul?” The reason for the siblings’ involvement in the cloak-and-dagger trade of souls is ... View Full Review

The Hexton Chronicles: The Trouble with Magic

Deftly-paced and dancing with emotional depth through its first-person narrative, The Trouble With Magic, first book in Amy Wilson’s The Hexton Chronicles, opens with Fray fleetingly living a “nice safe life in Brigstone” when the pull of his Hexton birthplace and tangible magic of his grandfather’s Croxometer sees him cross the bridge to Hexton, armed with a letter of instructions (and warnings) from Old Skeg. On arrival, the sense of mystery heightens. Hexton is, after all, where they know how to grow magic “to great, thundering resonance&... View Full Review

Companion to Godfather Death, Sally Nicholls’ Three Brides for the Devil is a beautifully-told, strikingly-illustrated, fabulously-resonant folktale. Its compelling opening sets a cunning, sharp-edged tone: “There are fairy tales where a man marries a proud or shrewish woman and turns her into an obedient wife. I hear even Mr Shakespeare wrote a tale like that once. There are other tales where a woman opens a forbidden door, and terrible things happen to her. This story is a little different”. And then comes the Devil, riding into town disguised as a handsome man “... View Full Review

First in a series, Mìriam Bonastre Tur’s Marionetta is a gloriously gothic graphic novel that sets a suspenseful mood from the get-go, when Julia is asked “what have you done? Did you...did you just kill him?” before the action swiftly shifts to months earlier when Julia and her best friend Kamille board a busy bus, and Kamille notices that the only empty seat is beside “one of those ah’kon people”, a violet-eyed man with a badge on his forehead. When it turns out that the bus ... View Full Review

A dynamic, lyrical, thrilling feast for fans of literary fantasy, Piers Torday’s Wolf Crown begins with Tibor and Roza without “the immortal powers which would once have helped them against an enemy. This was the price paid to discover the Midnight Treasure”. Such is the high-stakes context of the second novel in the author’s celebrated Midnight Treasure series. While Roza (formerly “a vampir transformed into a dog”, and now a mere “mortal girl”) declares “We are done with that magic of the dark”, Tibor is still ... View Full Review

Sharing a moment-by-moment story of the 1966 mining disaster that shook a community, and indeed the whole of Wales and wider UK, Aberfan: A Family Story sees author-illustrator Jack Lewis relate the tragic events through the lens of his own family in graphic novel form. All the more poignant as a result of this personal context, this is non-fiction at its most impactful, with striking illustrations and a combination of the author’s narrative and words shared by three members of his family amounting to a tremendously powerful work. For context, on the morning of 21st October 1966, ... View Full Review

Set in 798 CE, Saviour Pirotta’s An Elephant for the Emperor sees two boys from very different backgrounds transcend their differences through an elephant that’s fit for an emperor, and a perilous quest. After arriving in Baghdad “jobless, penniless and homeless with only a qalam, a reed pen, to his name”, orphan Hudayn dreams of becoming a calligrapher like his grandfather. After being unfairly fired from his backbreaking job as a hospital cleaner, a golden opportunity comes Hudayn’s way when he’s invited to ... View Full Review

A village steeped in spooky legends and a mansion in a state of disrepair serve as the ominous settings for John Mackay’s The Haunting of Old Splinter. Melding contemporary context and family dynamics with a creepy mystery, it rings with the age-old “be careful what you wish for” adage as it rises to a climax Edgar Allan Poe would be proud of. Like his mum, Adrian loves reading horror comics, and both he and his step-brother Peter love listening to enigmatic, local eccentric Alfie tell strange stories. One such story is that of a ... View Full Review

Part of the inventive Hands on History series, Raksha Dave’s The Archaeologist’s Discoveries reveals the cultural preciousness of ancient artefacts through a compelling scrapbook format. Immersive as it encourages budding historians to think about the significance of material culture, it also invites readers to interact with artefacts through touching the tactile embossed images on every spread. Following an introduction that explains how ancient artefacts are preserved (in soil, underwater, in the cold and in heat), illustrated detail on ten specific treasures cover how each item was discovered, how it was preserved, who would have used it, ... View Full Review

Lucid, vivid, and briskly-paced, Tanya Landman’s retelling of Animal Farm never compromises the potency of Orwell’s original, from the opening pages when Major, “a majestic pig, with a wise and kindly appearance”, declares that the reason the animals of Manor Farm “live miserably” in a state of servitude is “because the produce of our labour is stolen by human beings”. After issuing his farmyard comrades with a call to action (“Rebellion!”) and declaring that “all animals are equal”, Major dies, and on ... View Full Review

The Earth Transformed - Illustrated edition

Offering a fresh perspective on global history, this illuminating illustrated adaptation of Peter Frankopan’s bestselling The Earth Transformed reveals how natural forces have shaped our world. Framed in the context of Frankopan’s early passion for history, and the fact he longed for a broader perspective (“The way I was taught it, history had nothing to do with the weather, with climate, or environmental change”), this certainly delivers his aim of rendering the past “more vibrant, richer and more exciting” through “widening the lens ... View Full Review