Adventuremice set sail!

There’s great excitement in the Mouse Islands, because today is the day that Otter Chaos is finally published. The first of my new Adventuremice series with Sarah McIntyre is in UK and Irish bookshops NOW, and it’s looking lovely, packed as it is with Sarah’s beautiful watercolour illustrations. It started out as a series of nautical mouse paintings she did during the pandemic lockdowns, and you can find out more about it at our snazzy new website, adventuremice.com, which features videos, quizzes, drawing guides, and a handy classroom pack of free, easily downloadable resources for teachers.

You can even read the first chapter of Otter Chaos there for free there, to find out whether it’s Your Sort Of Thing. Several young reviewers have already decided that it is their sort of thing: here’s a very in-depth appreciation by six-year-old Jesse for Books Up North, while the discerning Peapod over at Bellis Does Books awards it an impressive ‘four hundred and eleventy hundred out of ten’. An advance copy went down well with the children at Chagford Primary School, too:

We’re hoping these books will appeal to children who are just starting to read independently and fancy something with a slightly longer text than a picture book, but still want plenty of pictures. But I think they’ll work well for reading aloud too, and hopefully older readers will enjoy the humour and all the details Sarah has crammed into the illustrations. Here’s her map of the Mouse Islands, the teeny tiny archipelago where the Adventuremice live.

We have plenty more adventures in the works for our mice - the second book in the series will come out in the summer, and Sarah has just finished illustrations for the third, to be published in early autumn. And some of Sarah's original artwork is also available on the website, if you want to own a picture of your favourite mouse. But they’re selling fast, so best hurry!

Adventuremice - Otter Chaos is published by David Fickling Books, & available from all good bookshops.

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29 March 2023 at 03:26

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