In this story of hope and endurance, we follow a scientist and her team during their search for the elusive 'Giant Arctic Jellyfish'. In a cruel twist, while the girls’ words heal, words can also can hurt, as shown when someone starts sending nasty poems. As Gala and Natalie try to clear their names and work out who’s responsible, this empathy-filled novel reveals the value of being heard, the power of language, and what it means to feel at home. The Nottinghill Carnival takes central stage in this story about families, memories and the power of dance and festivals. Author Yaba Badoe tells... Author Anna Kemp introduces The Hollow Hills, the sequel to her dark magical tale, Into Goblyn Wood. Crucially, most of the puns aren’t even funny: tortured, convoluted, overly-reliant on obscure pop culture minutiae, and some barely even qualify as puns. Most of the competitions rely, as the competitors readily admit, on quantity rather than quality, and by half way through the climactic day-long battle even the audience is bored. And blow-by-blow descriptions of these contests takes up most of the book.

Our primary mission is to provide an unlimited number of sign language and CDI interpreters to the greater Pacific Northwest Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Deaf/Blind community, with personal attention and professional service that meets your highest expectations.I read Our Sister Again by Sophie Cameron last year and really enjoyed it so I was looking forward to reading Away With Words when I heard about it and it didn't disappoint me. This was another strong contemporary book set in Scotland with a twist, this time that in the world they live in you can see other people's words. I love puns. I love puns with the passion of a thousand firey suns. They are my favorite type of joke, and if you tell me a good pun, we'll be friends for life. So, to see this book, and discover that such a thing as a Pun Competition actually exists, I couldn't wait to get my hands on and read this book. Tell me of these award winning punners! Loved both the protagonists, Gala has a wonderful character, a dollop of selfishness totally appropriate to her age and situation, she's kind and brave, with Natalie adding the eccentric flair that brings out her own. Her dad's same-sex relationship is portrayed matter-of-factly and sympathetically, with the family issues she's experiencing resolved within the context of her own school story. It goes mostly as expected, with no surprises along the way. This is why it didn’t work better for me, though MG fiction is among my favourite genres. Of course, the target age group might not have the same requirement of wanting surprises. If you wanted, you could read the book as a slice-of-life dispatch from arty, gentrifying Brooklyn: a place so suffused with post-intellectualism intellectuals that an organic community arose around punning, the way small towns spin up Elks lodges. You could read it as the story of how cosmopolitans are reclaiming nerd culture from actual, off-putting nerds. (The O. Henry organizers in this book are insufferable, pun-dantic chauvinists.)

Competent, yes. Underwhelming, also yes. As somebody whose wife will happily point out that he won’t ever shut up if a loaded pun is ready to go off, I think it says something that this didn’t make me race to get through it.Gala has finally started adapting to her new life in Scotland and is determined to find the culprit. Can she and Natalie show the school who they really are?