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Joanne Owen - Editorial Expert

Joanne Owen is a writer, reviewer and workshop presenter whose lifelong love of books began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, Wales. An early passion for culture, story and folklore led her to read archaeology and anthropology at St John’s, Cambridge, after which she led the UK children’s book team for a major international retailer, going on to market books for Bloomsbury, Macmillan, Walker Books, Nosy Crow and Rough Guides. She now divides her time between writing, travel writing, reviewing and hosting writing workshops.

Joanne is the author of several books for children and young adults, among them the Martha Mayhem series, the Carnegie Medal-nominated Puppet Master, and You Can Write Awesome Stories, a how-to guide to creative writing. She’s also worked on a major community story project for the National Literacy Trust (Story Quest), and a number of travel guides, including The Rough Guide to Responsible Wales and guidebooks to the Caribbean region. In additional, she’s an occasional chair of LoveReading LitFest events, and judge for the 2023 Branford Boase Award.

Latest Features By Joanne Owen

Summer sizzlers for Young Adults – the best YA novels set in summer

20+ Brilliant Books Featuring Unforgettable Deaf or Hard of Hearing Characters for Deaf Awareness Week

Get creative with creatures! 3 awesome animal-themed writing activities for National Pet Month

Christmas creations — four festive writing prompts sparked by the season of sparkle!

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Latest Reviews By Joanne Owen

Miranda Moore’s A Beautiful, Terrible Thing is devastatingly impactful as it shares a story of beautiful life-changing first love and the ravaging emotional dilemmas that come in the wake of terrible loss. Nathan is smitten when he first see Cara in a café. Shattered by causing the death of a boy after running a red light and fiddling with his phone, her “fresh natural look” and “easy posture” immediately make him “feel a kilo lighter”. In the same ... View Full Review

Boasting beautiful, bright, characterful illustrations, Carly Gledhill’s Pencil’s Best Story Ever invites little ones to join Peanut on a joyously colourful adventure, as directed by Pencil the author. After Peanut packs his backpack with “all sorts of useful adventury things”, he embarks on a BIG ADVENTURE, with Pencil promising that this will be “my BEST STORY EVER”. As for the story within a story that unfolds, it begins with a very useful map that tells Peanut to head to THE SUPER SPOOKY FOREST. ... View Full Review

Angie Thomas’ Nic Blake and the Remarkables: The Book of Anansi sees Remarkable girl Nic issued with an excruciating ultimatum. Filled with witty one-liners, fast-paced action and dazzlingly-conjured characters (not least Nic’s president Grandma and flock of flower- festooned aunties), it’s also powerfully propelled by African American history, folklore and lived experience. All of which amounts to an absolute slam dunk of a book. While preparing for the all-important exam that will see her start being schooled in using her Gift, Nic is haunted by dreams of being hunted ... View Full Review

Evocatively illustrated by Ross MacRae, Simon Lamb’s Mat o' Shanter: A Cautionary Tale is a wondrously unique reimagining of Robert Burns’ Tam o’ Shanter poem. Transposing the Scottish bard’s “middle-aged man drinking alcohol with his friends down the pub” to a boy drinking Irn-Bru with his mates, and replacing the original risqué witch with a girl named Lily, it dances with invention, and rounds off with a new cautionary twist on Burns’ original tale. We meet Mat o’Shanter, a Prestwick lad who&... View Full Review

Billed as a “seek and find adventure”, Haluka Nohana‘s Welcome to the Penguin Cruise is a work of multi-layered picture book joy. In part the story of a penguin family taking a dream cruise aboard Oceano Penguino, it’s also a fun interactive adventure that invites little ones to search for missing treasure. Throughout, detailed cross-section illustrations offer windows into the Oceano Penguino’s five storeys — much like classic Richard Scarry books, there’s so much to spot across the vessel’s twenty-four rooms, which include ... View Full Review

This tite is available directly as an audiobook, e-book and paperback here Created by consultant neurodevelopmental paediatrician Dr Susan Ozer, who’s written a number of books that harness the magic of storytelling to make medical concepts easier for kids, carers and parents to comprehend, Little Caterpillar’s Big Surprise is specifically aimed at 4-7-year-olds with developmental or learning difficulties. Framed in the context of the fact that children who are struggling to learn, or are developing at a slower pace than their peers, often suffer from low self-esteem and feel like they don’t ... View Full Review

The Thief of Time, second book in Sam Copeland’s Alex Vs Axel series, sees Alex and Axel, the accidental place-swapping heroes, embark on a race-against-time quest to save Earth from the effects of time being frozen. Fast-paced and funny, it’s a blast of fresh fantastical air, albeit air with a whiff of something decidedly dangerous. The stage is suspensefully set in the Prologue when a “man who had once been dead raised his arms and whispered ancient words”. Words that summon Time-Eaters to devour planet Earth in order for the once-dead man ... View Full Review

Laying bare the rawness of grief, the unfairness of death, and a longing to find meaning in life, James Dixon’s Crow Children is a remarkably well-written novel. Boasting a beautifully lucid style, every word works wonders as it sees a girl navigate coping with the sudden death of her father while witnessing her beloved grandmother lose her memories. Ava never got to say goodbye to her dad. He dropped down dead at work and that was that. Sometimes, this “made her shake with rage.” Other times, “she felt so incredibly unhappy. The sense ... View Full Review

Wrapping up Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s Geomancer trilogy in sweepingly lyrical style, The Ship of Strays is steeped in storytelling magic that will surely satisfy the devoted readers awaiting its release. Indeed, Ysolda’s journey of self-discovery continues to see her grow and take some unexpected turns, with a focus on Eira adding further depth. As potent earth magic swells within Ysolda, she must find a way to work with it. A seminal moment comes when Eira brings her to realise that the threads “reaching from my mind” connect ... View Full Review

Part of the Real-Life Mysteries series that melds non-fiction with a reading for pleasure ethos, Tales of Ghosts and Hauntings takes an engagingly unique investigative approach to exploring an age-old, all-important creepy question: do ghosts really exist? Split into six case study-style chapters, readers are invited to do deep dives into the eyewitness accounts of folks who’ve (allegedly) experienced creepiness in the Cairngorms (such as seeing monsters in the mist, and spirits on summits), and had petrifying palace encounters around the globe, with other chapters covering demon dogs, ghastly ghost ships and trains taunted by ... View Full Review

Charlie Nutbrown’s The Feathered Book is a debut of the highest order. Think Wind in the Willows with added mystery, which begins when The Feathered Book, a volume brimming with images of “arcane symbols, strange flowers [and] sinister equipment”, vanishes from an underground library. As a result of being authored by an ancient alchemist, and under a curse, the book’s disappearance can only mean one thing — danger and, quite possibly, death. Into this, we meet Monty the fox as he makes a big announcement to Nettle, his rabbit companion: “... View Full Review

Feminist History for Every Day of the Year

Opening with an absolutely brilliant, tone-setting framing quote from writer Rebecca West (“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat”), Kate Mosse’s Feminist History for Every Day of the Year brims with the wisdom and wit of hundreds of “trailblazers who refused to accept the limitations put on them, who campaigned and marched, battled and challenged the status quo to change the world for the better”, as Mosse writes in ... View Full Review