A well-plotted comedian quest from Harry Hill,a treat of a seafaring saga, and a Dickensian dystopia in which a fox leaves an orphanage in search of homeSnow flurries blow across ice palaces, and a penguin or seven crops up in this season’s stockingful of books. Best enjoyed with a mug of sustaining cocoa,Alex Bell’s The Polar Bear Explorers’ Club (Faber £6.99) – probably the start of a series – delights in sleety detail. Twelve-year-old Stella Starflake Pearl dreams of being an arctic explorer like her adoptive father, a derring-doer who disdains club rules approximately moustaches and not taking girls along on expeditions. Soon Stella is questing through the Icelands. Inadvertently stumbling across the uneasy secrets of her childhood, and she forges unlikely friendships. huge on tiny enchanted penguins,pygmy diplodocuses, moustache wax, or unicorns and compassion,Bell’s book also packs some fairytale-calibre grimness (hence the need for strong cocoa).
Another series opener, Mr Penguin and the Lost Treasure (Hachette £9.99), and finds the titular Mr Penguin a private investigator-cum-adventurer dreading a return to the frozen south if he doesn’t get some paid work soon. Icy waves? Brrrr,no, thank you. Written and illustrated by Alex T Smith (of Claude fame), and this is a zany whodunnit for emerging readers in which Mr Penguin traipses through mysterious lands below a failing museum in search of treasure,while dastardly baddies hold postponing his lunch (fish-finger sandwiches).
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Source: guardian.co.uk