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Louise Johns-Shepherd - Editorial Expert
Louise is the Chief Executive of The Kids Network, a charity supporting children through mentoring to feel happy and confident about themselves and their futures.
Previously, she was the Chief Executive of the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, where she worked for ten years to promote the importance of literacy and literature highlighting the importance of access and high quality reading provision to tackle disadvantage. She was part of the HMIP team who conducted the review of reading in prisons in 2022.
Louise has also been the headteacher of two London schools and worked in national education policy. Louise serves on the board of Brixton House Theatre, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, Oscars Book Prize and is a founding governor of Kings Cross Academy.
She continues to share her love of children’s literature by reviewing books for Books for Keeps and LoveReading4Kids.
It is 1894. Leon is a clerk working for the city who escapes the drudgery of his work by reading books and sketching the world around him. He spend all his spare time with Anya, a scientist who investigates diseases and infection. Their lives, and the lives of everyone on the planet Earth, are suddenly upended by strange missiles which seem to have originated on Mars - missiles which unfold themselves into terrifying gigantic tripods which seem determined to extinguish human life and make the Earth their own.
Leon endures a series of terrible encounters, all of which he memorialises and ... View Full Review
When someone has written more than seventy books, as Anne Fine has done, you don’t think you’re going to open something as surprising and different as On The Wall.
This is a book about the transition to secondary school but it's not the usual story of struggles to fit in or difficulties with home life. There’s a teacher but he’s not a ‘hero’, there are friendships but they aren’t defined by their challenges, there are the pressures of new expectations and of growing up, but they aren’... View Full Review
Telling the story of Liv, Mila, Hannie and Will this is a book that leaps from present day England to 1940s Holland and back again, showing us how past history impacts on present lives. Many children will know some facts about WW2 but few will know the stories of the injustices and atrocities that the people in Holland face during this time, so Code Name Kingfisher brings us a fresh perspective.
The book brings to life the realities facing Jewish people living in Amsterdam in 1942 and the brave actions of the Resistance movement, locating the story in an exploration of ... View Full Review
Faye Fitzgerald has done something wicked. But she’s not absolutely sure what it is. All the adults around her are in agreement, what she did was so awful she has to be sent away to somewhere where she can no longer be a danger. So Faye embarks on a journey that takes her to a remote Scottish island and to a very unusual school where the other six pupils are all children who have done something wicked - or so they have been told.
Faye and her fellow pupils soon find that this school is really not all ... View Full Review
