Marie Robert - Author

12/01/2025

It's been a while since I wrote a newsletter but here is a little note from me for the start of 2025!

Sorry for the double email…title error. But despite that, I hope you all had a wonderful, restful, and book-ful break from the schedule!

08/01/2025

🎁📚My city gives all children book tokens for Christmas so our job today was to go and spend them (and then go to a cafe to start reading them!) Here is what the girls picked out

🩷Little A: one she can read herself and one to be read to her
🩷Little C: the latest tome of one of her favourite BDs. This is such a beautifully drawn story
🩷Big C: a history of sports (she's been on a non-fiction kick recently)

🇫🇷French bookshop haha so all our purchases this time were in French 🎁❣️📚

08/01/2025

My city sends a new year gift to each household instead of a card and this year this is what we got! Isn't that a great idea!

27/12/2024

Gotta love a good dad joke, especially book jokes!

26/12/2024

*I'd love to see your haul!*

Part of the bookhaul for the 3 girls here. A great mix though we obviously favour fiction since only 2 are nonfiction (apples dont fall far and all that haha). Biggest girl's 'godmother books' not pictured 😆

19/12/2024

I read 22 middle grade novels this year (that included a series of 3 and duo (main book plus the prequel)) and started a few others but didn't make it to the end

- One of them was so good I wish it had an adult equivalent (Boy in the Tower)
- One series (Nevermoor) I loved so much I have pre-ordered the 4th installment already
- Many dealt with subjects it's rare to see on the page (and that might be favourite overall point!)

💛 I really enjoyed most of the novels in this challenge
💛 It felt great to get an update on what exists now in this age-range
💛 I got to see the variety of themes exist and how much better it is as compared to when I was a child in terms of dealing with modern difficult subjects, inclusion etc

❌ I found it hard to predict how easy or hard the ‘level’ would be - this will always be an issue for my patients with dyslexia
❌ I found a lack of short novels with top age bracket interest

16/12/2024

For perhaps my last middle grade book of the year we have 'Snow and Rose'.

This is a beautiful book both it's visuals and it's prose.

Great for middle grade readers over 9 and with all the hallmarks of a good fairytale this has a nice wintery feel to it.

One to curl up with

02/12/2024

❤️This book is the prequel to ‘A kind of Spark’ that I loved and reviewed earlier this year.

📚The major themes are autism and bullying but there is so much more to this book.

📚I was struck by the way the author pitches important topics at exactly the right level for middle grade, even early middle grade readers.

📚I think it would be a great way to begin (or continue) some in-depth and significant conversations about ableism in our society.

😍Bonus points: My 10 yr old also LOVED it.

13/11/2024

I'm always up for introducing a classic to younger readers.

I had never read White Fang and while I am glad I did, I am not sure I would recommend it for ‘free reading’.

It has themes which might be hard for modern kids to relate to (e.g. vi0lence towards animals).

I think it would be better read in class, so there could be structured discussions.

The vocabulary and sentence structures are better suited to older middle grade readers.

But the descriptions of life in the wild are beautiful and it has some strong messages.

22/10/2024

I loved this book!!!!

Not one for kids who are very sensitive as it is a disaster story and deals with depression.

However, the story was so good, I wish it had been written for adults. A rogue plant is destroying buildings and Ade is stuck inside the last one. Will he survive, and how?

I loved it for my dyslexic patients too, as it has really short sentence structures but that doesn’t take away from the story or dumb it down.

It was just a great read!

02/10/2024

Really enjoyed this because :

It's a book about girls playing chess and excelling ❤️♟️
The language is pitched well
The story is believable
The drama relatable

I think it would be a great read for any budding chess player (all the chapter names are based on chess forms or moves which I loved)!

My girls are lined up to read it already!

12/09/2024

Still excited!

*A fellow SLT has featured my books in her website*

It's a lovely site and the books listed are by other SLTs and have uses in therapy. Feel free to check it out. This is the link for 'Ivy's New Garden'

It’s not always easy when something you love changes. When her wild, out of bounds garden is closed for renovation, Ivy is heartbroken. She can't believe her favourite place is gone. How can she possibly love the new garden? But with time and a little encouragement, Ivy learns to embrace new possi...

11/09/2024

How exciting!

*A fellow SLT has featured my books in her website*

It's a lovely site and the books listed are by other SLTs and have uses in therapy. Feel free to check it out. This is the link for 'Georgia's Far-Away Family' and I'll share the Ivy link tomorrow!

Georgia, a little girl who does not live in the same place as many members of her extended family. She doesn’t see them often and this makes her a little sad. In school, she changes the way she thinks about her international family. A story of acceptance of different types of families in our incre...

10/09/2024

This book, set in New Zealand, was translated from the Maori language and reads like a cross between a novel and mythic tale.

It might be hard for children just starting out with novels or children with reading difficulties as it has passages still in Maori which might be tough to decipher and switch between.

However, I really liked it. It is beautifully told, short, a look into a culture we rarely see in literature and a young female lead character is always a bonus!

08/09/2024

My youngest really likes this book and today started to copy the cover.

Her sisters used to do this so I wonder if that's where she got the idea...

04/09/2024

Went to a Comic Book exhibition today with my daughters!

Comic books are literature too!

They are a great source of 📚vocabulary, 📙narrative structure and a way to visualise 💬speech and internal thoughts💭...not to mention the art work itself!

So let them read comics, especially with reluctant readers!

26/08/2024

This is a well known series so I thought I would check it out and I really liked it. A quirky family are forced to relocate from their beloved New York Brownstone home and it’s a race against time to stop the move! It’s got lots of ‘real life’ and then a bit of ‘probably not exactly like real life’ too which I enjoyed. Level is good for anyone over 8 I think though probably better from 9 years and up. Sweet story with lots of family mayhem. One I will keep to recommend.

26/07/2024

This is something I do with my older patients. It's so much easier for people with language disorder or dyslexia to identify the errors if they can both see and hear them.