The Sandman and the Turtles (Mammoth Read) - Softcover

Former Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo needs no introduction. He is one of the most successful children's authors in the country, loved by children, teachers and parents alike. Michael has written more than forty books for children including the global hit War Horse, which was made into a Hollywood film by Steven Spielberg in 2011. Several of his other stories have been adapted for screen and stage, including My Friend Walter, Why the Whales Came and Kensuke's Kingdom. Michael has won the Whitbread Award, the Smarties Award, the Circle of Gold Award, the Children's Book Award and has been short-listed for the Carnegie Medal four times. He started the charity Farms for City Children in 1976 with his wife, Clare, aimed at relieving the "poverty of experience" many young children feel in inner city and urban areas. Michael is also a patron of over a dozen other charities. Living in Devon, listening to Mozart and working with children have provided Michael with the ideas and incentive to write his stories. He spends half his life mucking out sheds with the children, feeding sheep or milking cows; the other half he spends dreaming up and writing stories for children. "For me, the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out - the writing down of it I always find hard. But I love finishing it, then holding the book in my hand and sharing my dream with my readers." Michael received an OBE in December 2006 for his services to literature.

A pitch-perfect delivery brightens this familiar-seeming tale about stories that come true. Visiting his relatives at their farm in Wales every summer, Michael looks forward to Gramps's storytelling, "like a long, happy sigh at the end of each day." The stories are so much a part of the fabric of the summer that when Michael takes his seven-year-old cousin, Polly, to the beach and creates a Sandman like the one Gramps has described, it does not entirely surprise them that the Sandman wakes up and eats their picnic. Determined to help the Sandman return to his native Ireland, they enlist the help of another character from Gramps's repertoire. Predictably, the family reacts to Polly's progress reports with good-natured disbelief (Michael carefully evades the issue). Consequently there is some satisfaction when the various characters reveal themselves to Gramps and Aunt Eleri, especially when Aunt Eleri proves herself a worthy hostess by producing miraculous quantities of tea. Inextricably linking summer holidays with magic, Morpurgo (Waiting for Anya) casts a spell with his ambient dialogue-the Sandman's brogue and the British inflections rise from the page like music. Ages 8-12.
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