Gordon Snell

I thought that this was a very interesting story and could keep the reader’s attention through the pictures and especially though the rhyming of the text. The words were very playful and the rhyming flowed very well. I like how this book captures children’s’ imaginations and questions about travelling to the “edge of the earth.” It keeps their creativity going while teaching a lesson about questioning others and not believing everything they hear; there are multiple sides to an argument.… (mais)

John Peters (Booklist, Jan. 1, 2001 (Vol. 97, No. 9))
In these 12 new stories, young people approach or step over the threshold of adulthood, driven by soul-deep infatuation, a glimpse of girls in underwear, failures of parents or older sibs, beginning a new life in America, or ending one in a Liverpool abortion clinic. Some ominous or horrifying experiences (a teenager discovers bulimia, a girl is physically tortured by peers for dating a "proddy") alternate with profound or triumphant discoveries (a girl turns lemons to lemonade after losing her hair to chemotherapy). Aside from Chris Lynch and Maeve Binchy, the authors here may be new even to well-read American teens, but brief biographical notes provide some background as well as leads to other titles. As editor Snell points out, Ireland is moving away from it's violence-ridden, economically depressed past, so readers whose vision of the country has been shaped by immigration and potato-famine stories may be surprised by how often the teenagers and the concerns in these selections seem familiar.… (mais)

This is a postive book about a librarian, Joan Bright, who is helpful to the children as well as being open to new ideas. However her replacement (and one of the obvious bad guys of the story)Miss Carr is almost a cliche of all that is bad about some librarians and some of the cliches about librarians. If I was to seriously nit-pick the story I would point out that she would have been stopped earlier for some of her actions and that her appointment was dodgy at the least, but that's because I know a lot about public libraries. However the entire thing works for the story.

This is the story of the Ballygandon Gang, a group of children in Ballygandon who get involved in mysteries and adventures, a missing doccument and further run-ins with some previous nemesis'. It's a fun read and although it's part of a series and it would be better to read in sequence as there are references to previous adventures it works on it's own.… (mais)