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Topic: Ones to Watch - Spring 2021

Chapter book

Laurie’s home-made beauty recipes are no secret. The secret is that her eco-warrior family get their ingredients from the bin .

Laurie loves her family and she wants to join them in making the world a better place, one home-made bath bomb at a time. But right now, she doesn’t want to be fishing her food out the bin. She just wants to go for a hot chocolate with her friends after school and be a normal kid.

So when a competition comes to Silverdale High looking for the next best ‘Business with a difference’, and the most popular girl in school, wants to team up to sell Laurie’s lotions and potions, she can hardly believe her luck. But can she find success and popularity without losing sight of her true self?

Joanne O’Connell’s Beauty and the Bin is a fresh and funny debut about friends, family, school and being a young eco-warrior.

Chapter book

What if you could befriend a cloud? What weather would you choose? What if the weather matched itself to your mood, whether you wanted it to, or not?

11-year-old Stella has returned home to Shetland to spend the summer with her Grandpa, but it’s nothing like she remembers. Grandpa is lost in his grief for Gran, the island is bleak and Stella feels trapped, until she encounters an old woman, Tamar, who can spin rainbows and call hurricanes.

With the help of Nimbus, a feisty young storm cloud, Stella begins to learn the craft of weather weaving. But when her cloud brain-fogs Grandpa and The Haken (a sea witch) starts to close in, she realises that magic comes with big responsibilities. It will take all her heart and courage to face the coming storm…

THE WEATHER WEAVER is essentially a Moana tale for Shetland; a coming of age story, intertwined with island myths and hidden magic. At its heart, the novel tackles the following themes: independence, the meaning of home, and the fallibility of grown-ups.

Chapter book

A record-smashing, feel-good adventure packed with heart, humour and Guinness World Records from Costa Award-shortlisted JENNY PEARSON, and Kid Normal illustrator Erica Salcedo

Lucy is a fixer of broken things. But there’s one thing she can’t fix and that’s her unhappy mum. Until she comes up with an INCREDIBLE plan. Along with her best friend, Sandesh, Lucy is going to SMASH a world record.

Because she’s convinced that starry Paul Castellini – Record Smashers TV host and singing legend – is the answer to her mum’s problems. But breaking a world RECORD when watermelons, kumquats, two baddies and a 30 cm shatter-resistant school ruler are involved isn’t quite as easy as Lucy thought. Can she learn that sometimes happiness doesn’t come with a plan?

Chapter book

The hilarious and moving new book from funny fiction superstar Sam Copeland, author of the bestselling Charlie Changes Into a Chicken .

Uma Gnudersonn has a head full of questions: How can I save my home from being sold? Will my dad ever start talking again? And how do alpacas get drunk? But since her mum died, Uma’s life has been short on answers.

Then she finds a genius artificial intelligence called Athena who knows everything.

Suddenly Uma has the answer to any question she can imagine – from the capital of Mozambique to the colour of her headteacher’s underpants – and she’s going to use them to save her home and her father.

Along the way, Uma will have to confront the sinister inventor who will stop at nothing to get Athena back – and face up to the fact that not all questions have answers…

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Stone Girl Bone Girl

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