The Girl with the Shark’s Teeth
Cerrie Burnell
OUP Oxford, £6.99
ISBN: 9780192767547

Cerrie Burnell has written a novel for children who, for many reasons, aren’t able to relate to fairy tales of princes and princesses, pirates and mermaids. It’s a beautiful, magical tale that any young person will enjoy; an old-fashioned adventure story that will fire up the imaginations of all.

Andrea Donnelly is deputy headteacher at Hollymount School in Worcester

I would recommend this story to people who like reading about adventures. It wasn’t really the type of story I usually read. This book is set in the water and I’m not familiar with stories of sea creatures, so at times I found it difficult. I thought the character Minnow was very brave and it was good reading about how she solved problems.

Xsara, aged 11

Woo’s Wonderful World of Maths
Eddie Woo
Macmillan Australia (available through Amazon UK)
ISBN: 9781760554217

Eddie Woo is a man on a mission to share the secrets he discovered on his journey to understanding that “maths is all around us”. This isn’t a conventional book about maths. Rather, its 26 chapters feel like a collection of mini-essays on such a variety of topics that, even if one or two of them didn’t actually float my boat, it wasn’t an issue. Woo’s enthusiasm for maths is obvious on every page, and it’s infectious. The opening chapter is titled “Born mathematicians” and reassures the reader that we are all mathematicians at heart because our brains are pattern-recognising machines. Woo wants to share how he discovered that maths is more than he thought it was. I applaud his mission.

Mel Muldowney is a secondary maths teacher at a school in the West Midlands

* This article originally appeared in the 25 January 2019 issue