We were recently sent a selection of books to review from My Little Big Town Publishing. The books were from the A Tiny Twisted Tale collection by Calvin Innes.
Calvin Innes is a children’s writer and illustrator that seems to have tapped right into a child’s mindset. The Tiny Twisted Tales are a collection of short stories and poems. Each Tiny Twisted Tale is about weird, gruesome or slightly scary things. Each book has loads of Calvin’s black and white line illustrations which bring his characters to life.
My personal favourite of the bunch was Jenny which is a story about a girl who likes to bash werewolves. H was very keen to read them and managed them himself with a little help – he found them quite challenging. He’s currently reading gold books (ORT level 9). I think the books are very appealing and would appeal to children from about 6 to 10 years of age. They are a good transition towards chapter books and I think would encourage a reluctant reader.
On the downside I wasn’t very keen on the typeface particularly the filled in ‘o’s which seem to appear when a word has a double o in it. There were also some American spellings like ‘mold’ instead of ‘mould’. These are minor points though and we’ll definetely be looking out for more from this series.
sounds interesting! L would find them scary but i think my 7 year old niece would like them – she is into anything with a bit of gore!