Meg Sorensen

Hero (Viking, 141 pp, $16.99 hb), Allan Baillie’s sixth novel for young readers, shows this seasoned storyteller at his best. Succinct yet incisive, it is a highly disciplined display of how tight technique can turn a single incident into an exciting story. Right from the first line, ‘A single drop of water exploded on Pamela Browning’s open exercise book’, we know we are on the precipice ... (read more)

You often bring baggage to a book. Previous books. Gossip. The author’s photograph. The design or picture on the cover. Tabula rasa I am not. As a reviewer, I do endeavour to wipe the slate as clean as possible, but there’s always the odd smudge. In the case of Nette Hilton’s The Web, I found my hackles rising on sight. What was this! A rip-off comic strip version of E.B. White with loopy dr ... (read more)

Meg Sorensen goes looking for the author of the award-winning One Dragon’s Dream and finds him doing dreadful things to cows – but still writing and illustrating. What a tragedy it would have been if after ten years the French had decided to let de Brunhoff’s masterworks fall by the wayside; if the Americans had shelved Sendak in favour of something more ‘current’, or the English publ ... (read more)