Eating Disorders: Book Reviews For Kids

Thursday, 8 November 2012

Book Reviews For Kids

If history is the new rock n’ roll, with best-selling books and TV series making millionaires out of Simon Schama, David Starkey and Niall Ferguson, then children’s history books are catching up fast. Ever since Terry Deary’s Horrible History series for Scholastic delighted children of 7+ by concentrating on the gruesome, gory aspects of the Romans, Tudors, Victorians etc., children’s publishers have become aware that history books, whether factual or fictional, are potential gold-mines. Deary’s series, which cunningly impart a good deal of fact alongside the entertainment, are irresistibly subversive, but this approach has its limitations, especially for children of 7-11 studying the National Curriculum. This requires a surprisingly thorough grounding of knowledge about the Vikings, Romans, Greeks, Tudors, Victorians and the Second World War. Parents over 35 may have fond memories of the Ladybird series of history books, and all lament the problems still besetting Doring Kindersley, whose large, clear books were models of their kind. However the Who Was? series are something worth hunting down.