Mini Grey Celebrates National Library Day in Woodstock

Come along and celebrate National Library Day at the Woodstock Library  with author and illustrator Mini Grey on Saturday 9 February at 11am. Mini is not only one of the very best author/illustrators working at the moment, she is an ex-primary teacher who has a wonderful rapport with children. 

                

The event is suitable for children aged 3-8 and their parents - all children must be accompanied by an adult.  Admission is free but places are limited and should be booked in advance, either through Woodstock Library (01993 812832) or The Woodstock Bookshop (01993 812760 or info@woodstockbookshop.co.uk).

           

Mini will be reading from Toys in Space and other recent work. She is the author of many brilliant books: Egg Drop, The Pea and the Princess (shortlisted for the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal), Biscuit Bear (winner of the Nestlé Children's Book Prize Gold Award), Traction Man is Here (winner of the Boston Horn Book Award and shortlisted for the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal), The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon (winner of the Nestlé Children's Book Prize Bronze Award and winner of the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal), and Traction Man meets Turbodog. 

Snow

Please ring before setting out to visit the shop today and over the weekend. I live in Dean and we are snowed in which means the shop is shut. Merle tried to drive in this morning from Charlbury without any success. I hope to open the shop tomorrow but it depends on how clear the roads are and whether more snow is on the way.  It has been snowing gently all day here and there are about three or four inches on the garden table. We've been out sledging - and now to sit by the fire...

Before I go and sit down I must just tell you about the talk by Rachel Joyce on Tuesday. She began by saying she didn't really like giving talks and would prefer to answer audience questions. But in fact she spoke very well about the book. There was a rawness to what she said and how she said it - she said there were many similarities between her and Harold. And one of the things that I thought while I was re-reading the book recently was how vulnerable he becomes, in a positive way. We spend so much of lives in a protective wadding, and Harold just walks out 'without his stuff', as Rachel Joyce put it, and by being open to people and events becomes open to himself again and to his memories and his marriage. It is what allows him to grow. Rachel's second book is coming out in the summer, I'm fascinated to see what she writes next.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Rachel Joyce is coming to the Methodist Church in Woodstock on Tuesday 15 January at 7pm to talk about her first book, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. The book tells the story of Harold and his walk from Kingsbridge to Berwick; the story of his marriage to Maureen - of his life and the inner journey he makes on his pilgrimage:

At first Maureen was convinced Harold would come back. He would phone, and he would be cold and tired, and she would have to go and fetch him, and it would be the middle of the night, and she would have to put a coat on over her nightdress and find her driving shoes; and all this would be Harold's fault. She had slept fitfully with the lamp on and the phone beside the bed, but he had neither rung nor come home.

    She kept going over all that had happened. The breakfast and the pink letter, and Harold not speaking, only weeping in silence. The smallest detail lurked in her mind. The way he had folded his reply twice and slipped it in the envelope before she could see. Even when she tried to think about something else, or nothing at all, she couldn't stop the picture swimming into her head of Harold staring at Queenie's letter, as if something deep inside him was undoing...

 

It is sad at times but also a very humorous book: 

'Deploying meticulously precise and deceptively light-as-air prose, Joyce takes Harold across the bitter wastelands of regret to the sunlit uplands of emotional redemption with a clarity that is at times almost unbearably moving' - Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times