Charlie Peach's Pumpkins and other stories

My review of Jenny Sanders' latest children’s book due to be published by Conrad Press coincides with her November blog tour.

 Following on from the highly entertaining and engaging The Magnificent Moustache and other stories is this excellent collection of six short stories that captures the same humour, pace, and tension as in Magnificent Moustache, and yet offers up another page-turner full of originality that will delight the younger reader.

 If you’re after one of those magic books that will keep adults amused and children enchanted Charlie Peach will be a good purchase.

 Jenny loves to poke fun, if gently, at the idiosyncrasies of the upper middle classes and their preoccupation with manners and convention. There are some wonderfully eccentric and stereotypical characters such as the alliterative Baxter, Bartholomew, and Belinda Beasley-Babbingtons, or my favourites: Candida Chumley-Smythe and Nora-Whittington Fay, or the distracted dentist Mr McCavity.

 Jenny has continued to introduce her young readers to a spattering of more complex and unexpected words such as tranquil, contingent, sommelier, or spouse, and humorous semi-invented words such as flusterment, muddlesome, or bazillion.

 Each of the six short stories in Charlie Peach contains unforgettable and imaginative scenes but, perhaps, none can surpass the resourcefulness of Shaun Scattergood as he adopts a French accent and acts the part of a sommelier serving up his absent grandfather’s ‘fine’ wines to such appreciative characters as Captain Radish and Lord Higginbottom.

 And…any children’s book that ends with a story about the Surprising Power of Cake is bound to do well.