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This Book Totally Makes Stuff Grow

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BfK No. 189 - July 2011

This issue's cover illustration is from Lia's Guide to Winning the Lottery by Keren David. Thanks to Frances Lincoln for their help with this July cover.

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This Book Totally Makes Stuff Grow

Maggie Bolger
 Nik Afia
(Walker)
32pp, NON FICTION, 978-1406326789, RRP £5.99, Paperback
5-8 Infant/Junior
Buy "Maggie & Rose: This Book Totally Makes Stuff Grow (Maggie and Rose)" on Amazon

This ‘activity’ picture book appears to be a by-product of the ‘hugely successful’ Maggie & Rose club which, to quote the publishers ‘now has over 500 families on their member books’. Such careless grammar makes me suspect the soundness of the work, which attempts to interest young folks in the practice and ecology of horticulture. Maggie, Rose and Oscar learn that you can make compost in three months – and this without activator and no inkling of what it’s like when it’s ready. That takes some believing.

The author – rightly too modest to be named either on title page or in bibliographical details – is very, and rightly, reverent of soil but then proceeds to call it ‘dirt’; this Americanism is not only confusing, it sounds disrespectful.

And those creatures which, 40 years ago, we all learned to call ‘minibeasts’, are here called ‘bugs’. This is not helpful when the United Kingdom is experiencing a huge increase in its bedbug population...

Reviewer: 
Ted Percy
1
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