Kid You Not Podcast: Recent Episodes
Lauren and Clementine
In Lauren’s words, ‘mothers are the scariest thing in children’s literature’. Find out why in this episode! You can download it HERE (28 min), subscribe to us on iTunes, or play it in the sidebar of the website. In this … Continue reading →
Purchase Cheap Generic Cialis Online Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror As a self-confessed lover of many of the ‘pleb’ genres (hello Andrew Mitchell) I adore ghost stories. One of the most well-thumbed books on my shelf as a child was … Continue reading →
What does representing other cultures in children’s literature entail? After a (long) summer break (sorry!), we are back to discuss this important question, and not on our own! Our special co-host for this anniversary episode of Kid You Not is… … Continue reading →
Everything you always wanted to know about sex in teenage literature, but were too afraid to ask your local librarian… In Episode 10 of Kid You Not, which is available to download HERE (29 minutes), or on iTunes, or in … Continue reading →
But surely only bad quality children’s literature is ideological? In this episode, we debunk the usual myths about ‘ideology’ being a really awful propagandist thing that brainwashes our children. Ideology is everywhere – and it might not be the most … Continue reading →
Apparently it’s not fiction, but then what is it? And why is it such a marginalised, and yet such a lucrative, domain in children’s publishing? In Episode 8 of Kid You Not, we discuss non-fiction for children. And as always, … Continue reading →
Funny books for kids abound. But can children really understand humour? And what’s the hidden side of all these jokes and puns? In Episode 7 of Kid You Not, which you can download HERE (31 min) or play in the … Continue reading →
What is the place of religion, God, and faith in children’s books? From the origins of children’s literature to modern-day agnosticism, we discuss this controversial theme in our episode which you can download HERE, or play in the sidebar (32 … Continue reading →
In this episode we discuss the omnipresence of death in children’s books… trying to keep it merry and cheerful! You can download the episode (30 mins) by clicking HERE, or by subscribing to our iTunes feed, or you can listen … Continue reading →
My little sister has recently discovered the joys of reading. On a recent holiday it was only her new-found habit that gave us respite from ‘can we go crab fishing/to the beach/have an ice cream?’, so I am very grateful … Continue reading →
Playing on repetition, apparently very dear to child readers,but adding a surrealistic twist to it, Stuck, Oliver Jeffers’s latest picturebook, is 100% efficient. Premise: a little boy gets his kite stuck in a tree. What do you do in this … Continue reading →
You know a children’s book in an English bookshop is a small miracle when it’s been translated from another language. Don’t want to sound sarcastic, but the English and the American translate enough books per year to fill a small … Continue reading →
On September 8th, at Homerton College, Cambridge, Philip Pullman gave a lecture on Philippa Pearce and Tom’s Midnight Garden, choosing the concept of time as his main focus. As expected, the lecture was brilliant: funny, erudite and confident. Judging by the questions … Continue reading →
One thing an e-reader was supposed to do was to remove ‘library anxiety’ – otherwise known as the worry that people will judge you by the book you read. Unfortunately I seem to suffer from this unfortunate ailment more than … Continue reading →
Yes, I know: where have I been these past six years?? It is the unforgivable truth, I had not yet read Percy Jackson. But now that I have at last, I thought I’d devote a Sunday review to the first … Continue reading →
This episode – which you can listen to by clicking HERE, or on the media player in the sidebar, or simply get it from iTunes – is a very, very, very special one… Owing partly to the power of Twitter, … Continue reading →
If you’re the ‘Oh please not another supernatural romance!’ type, just close this window and go tweet/ play Angry Birds/ do something with your life instead. I’m like that sometimes, too. I think everyone is pretty much fed up to … Continue reading →
When I was a real girl my best friend was called Cassandra… Novels about eating disorders always disconcert me, as they are so hard to get right. It is vital that the disease is portrayed sensitively, in order that the … Continue reading →
A heartwarming story in a great frozen land… Yes, I know, that was possibly the corniest sentence I’ve ever written. Still, that is exactly what Karin Littlewood’s delicate little picturebook Immi does to the reader. Immi is a charmingly old-fashioned … Continue reading →
A friend and fellow PhD student is currently reading the Hunger Games trilogy, and she’s reading it compulsively, as required by the book itself. When we first heard about the terrible Oslo massacre of July 22nd, she sent me the … Continue reading →
Bedbound for a significant portion of the week, I wanted something light to take my mind off things, so I escaped to the jungle with Fintan Fedora the World’s Worst Explorer. We follow the inept fourteen-year-old Fintan and Gribley, his … Continue reading →
‘What? Ideology? But children’s books aren’t ideological – that would be propaganda, it would be sacrilegious, it would be brainwashing!’ Literary criticism has shown us in the past century that no text can ever be devoid of ideological content, that … Continue reading →
Loyal listeners and lovely listeners-to-be, our problem with iTunes is now fixed. You can subscribe by clicking here ! Thanks a lot for your patience, Clem & Lauren
In this episode we discuss the controversial labels of ‘trash’ and ‘quality’… Click HERE to download the episode (28 minutes), or why not find us on iTunes and subscribe? In this episode you will hear us discuss… The point of … Continue reading →
An interesting thing about children’s books – when compared to adults’ books – is the strange preoccupation people seem to have with the notion that children’s books should be educational. A child should learn from reading a particular book; it … Continue reading →
This could be the subject of a whole book, but I’ll spare you the conceptual and definitional jargon. Here are five concise reasons why studying children’s literature is important, fascinating, and challenging. A children’s book is an adult’s book Adults … Continue reading →
David Walliams’s latest children’s novel is an easy-going, fun book, clearly geared to appeal to boys (and we do need boys’ books), and even more clearly designed by its publisher (Harper Collins) to fill the un-fillable gap left by Roald … Continue reading →
The most significant Harry-Potter-premiere-related tweet of the week was no doubt Barry Cunningham’s (@barrychicken) heart-wrenching (for the Pottermaniacal amongst us) remembrance of things past: Off to last Harry Potter premiere tomorrow with son Alfie, aren’t we lucky! Seems like only … Continue reading →
The weekend was spent in a flood of tears. Not because of any personal crisis in my own life, but because I finally read Jenny Downham’s Before I Die – one book on my huge list of things-I-must-read. Published in … Continue reading →
Patrick Ness winning the Carnegie Medal was somewhat lost in the hype surrounding Pottermore (including on Kid You Not!). Author of the Chaos Walking trilogy, the Medal was won by the final book in the series Monsters of Men. Focusing … Continue reading →
Artichoke Hearts by Sita Brahmachari (Macmillan, 2011) Teenage novel. Winner of the 2011 Waterstones’s Children’s Book Prize. It’s a book about colour-mixing, clashing patterns, dogs peeing on a tropical beach, painted coffins. It translates to the plot as the intermingling … Continue reading →
One minute forty-nine seconds of JK Rowling interspersed with beautiful (if slightly bobo) animation leave us with more questions than answers. The highly-anticipated Pottermore website will be an interactive reading experience, with readers’ contributions feeding into the original stories. Jo … Continue reading →
And you can subscribe to our podcast by clicking here! Thanks to this clever bit of technology, the next episodes of Kid You Not will download automatically into your library. But please keep checking our blog for updates! and don’t … Continue reading →
Click HERE to download Episode One of Kid You Not Podcast! (28 minutes) or listen to it on the feed player in the right sidebar –> Please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here! This week’s theme: In the first … Continue reading →
As a little teaser in advance of the release tomorrow, we thought we’d provide you with a brief account of our experience making the first episode of Kid You Not! Given that neither of us had any previous experience with … Continue reading →
We’re busy editing the first episode of the podcast, preparing the next one, and thinking up a publicity plan. Come back on Sunday 19th to listen to the first episode!