The summer holidays are here and if you can't wait to lounge around in the sunshine with a good book, Mrs Truran, Queenswood Head Librarian, has some fantastic reading suggestions for you.

Our Newsletter team are also keen to hear about your vacation reading choices and are offering edible prizes for any book reviews chosen to be printed in the newsletter next term. Please email your review to [email protected] to be in with a chance of winning a yummy prize!

We hope that you have a fun and restful break, get some sand between your toes and enjoy lots of good books during your time off. Happy holidays!

For Year 7  

Noah's Gold by Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Being the smallest doesn't stop you having the biggest ideas.

Eleven-year old Noah sneaks along on his big sister's geography field trip. Everything goes wrong! Six kids are marooned on an uninhabited island. Their teacher has vanished. They're hungry. Their phones don't work and Noah has broken the internet. There's no way of contacting home . . . Disaster!

Until Noah discovers a treasure map and the gang goes in search of gold.

Escape to the River Sea by Emma Carroll

In 1946, Rosa Sweetman, a young Kindertransport girl, is longing for her family to claim her. The war in Europe is over and she is the only child left at Westwood, a rambling country estate in the north of England, where she'd taken refuge seven years earlier.

The arrival of a friend of the family, Yara Fielding, starts an adventure that will take Rosa deep into the lush beauty of the Amazon rainforest in search of jaguars, ancient giant sloths and somewhere to belong. What she finds is Yara's lively, welcoming family on the banks of the river and, together, they face a danger greater than she could ever have imagined.

Featuring places and characters known and loved by fans of Journey to the River Sea (including, among others, Maia, Finn, Miss Minton and Clovis) this spectacular new chapter in the story tells of the next generation and the growing threats to the Amazon rainforest that continue to this day.

For Year 8                                                

The Song that Sings Us by Nicola Davies

When animals talk, it's time humans listened: Harlon has been raised to protect her younger siblings, twins Ash and Xeno, and their outlawed power of communicating with animals. But when the sinister Automators attack their mountain home they must flee for their lives. Xeno is kidnapped and Harlon and Ash are separated.

In a thrilling and dangerous adventure they must all journey alone through the ice fields, forests and oceans of Rumyc to try to rescue each other and fulfil a mysterious promise about a lost island made to their mother. A stunning environmental epic with cover and chapter illustrations by award-winning illustrator, Jackie Morris.

No Fixed Address by Susin Nielson

Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal

Felix Knutsson is nearly thirteen, lives with his mother and pet gerbil Horatio, and is brilliant at memorising facts and trivia. But Felix and his mom Astrid have a secret: they are living in a van.

Astrid promises it's only for a while until she finds a new job, and begs Felix not to breathe a word about it. So when Felix starts at a new school, he does his very best to hide the fact that most of his clothes are in storage, he only showers weekly at the community centre, and that he doesn't have enough to eat. When his friends Dylan and Winnie ask to visit, Felix always has an excuse.

But Felix has a plan to turn his and Astrid's lives around. All he needs is a little luck and a lot of brain power. . .

For Years 9, 10 &11 

The Blue Book of Nebo by Manon Steffan Ros

Dylan was six when The End came, back in 2018; when the electricity went off for good, and the 'normal' 21st century world he knew disappeared. Now he's 14 and he and his mam have survived in their isolated hilltop house above the village of Nebo in north-west Wales, learning new skills, and returning to old ways of living.

Despite their close understanding, the relationship between mother and son changes subtly as Dylan must take on adult responsibilities. And they each have their own secrets, which emerge as, in turn, they jot down their thoughts and memories in a found notebook - the Blue Book of Nebo.

In this prize-winning novel, Manon Steffan Ros not only explores the human capacity to find new strengths when faced with the need to survive, but also questions the structures and norms of the contemporary world.

The Revelry by Katherine Webber

A story of best friends, bad luck and the consequences of breaking the rules in a town built on secrets and superstitions.

Growing up in Ember Grove, Bitsy Clark knows better than to break the rules around the Revelry, the mysterious end-of-year party in the woods. So when her best friend, Amy, persuades her to sneak in, Bitsy is full of misgivings.

Misgivings that she should have listened to, because it's after the Revelry that Bitsy's luck turns and her life starts to unravel. For Amy it's the opposite, as if she's been blessed with good fortune.

Soon Bitsy is convinced that the Revelry has tied the two friends together in a curse that only she can break...

For Sixth Form, Parents, Guardians & Staff 

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets.

So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave?

Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe - as she has long believed - there is something wrong with her. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at 17, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain.

Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, foul-mouthed sister Ingrid), Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix - or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself.

Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin

Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Her daily life is lived to the rhythms of the hilarious and touching confidences of random visitors and her colleagues-three gravediggers, three groundskeepers, and a priest.

Violette's routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of police chief Julien Seul, wishing to deposit his mother's ashes on the gravesite of a complete stranger. Julien is not the only one to guard a painful secret: his mother's story of clandestine love breaks through Violette's carefully constructed defences to reveal the tragic loss of her daughter, and her steely determination to find out who is responsible.

The funny, moving, intimately told story of a woman who believes obstinately in happiness, Fresh Water for Flowers brings out the exceptional and the poetic in the ordinary. A delightful, atmospheric, absorbing tale.