MFB goes to Bath Kids Lit 2011

Mark and I are so excited about visiting Bath Kids Festival for the first time this year. We were heading that way as fans and readers, but got a fantastic surprise when we were approached by the organisors asking us if we would like to attend in our capacity as bloggers. We would be able to meet various authors and get the occasional one to one interview...

Wow! We could not say no. We considered which days to go down and booked our accommodation and we carefully, painstakingly and with various coloured markers, went over the schedule and chose which talks to attend.

And now we are set. I may not sleep until then.

In the meantime, the Festival organisors have come up with a fantastic way for us to keep busy. A group of bloggers, illustrators and authors are all taking part in creating an on-going story.

This is the press release:


The Bath Festival of Children’s Literature is launching a unique collaborative storytelling event on Thursday 8 September featuring well known authors and bloggers. There are 20 collaborators in the project including authors Marcus Sedgewick, John Boyne and Annabel Pitcher who will be appearing in the Bath Festival of Children’s Literature Festival, 23 September- 2 October. The story will be written in real-time with readers following the trail as it moves from blog to blog, with an addition to the story being posted at each stop.

The story will run from 8 September – 16 October with the first installment being posted on the Bath Festival of Children’s Literature blog http://bathkidslitfest.wordpress.com/ where readers can click through to the next installment. Every other day a new piece of the story will be posted and as it is being written in real-time it has the potential to touch on any genre imaginable.

Artistic Director John McLay said “We are hoping to highlight the creativity and dedication of both book blogs and author blogs, through which potential readers are enthused and entertained. There is an amazing amount of support for the book industry via blogging and this is a great way for Bath to capture that and do something fun and unique”.

Big Blog Story Schedule

8 September Bath Festival of Children’s Literature
10 September Robin Etherington
12 September Annabel Pitcher
14 September Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell
16 September Hannah Shaw
18 September Writing From the Tub
20 September Lauren Kate
22 September Marcus Sedgewick
24 September Alan Gibbons
26 September John Boyne
28 September Catherine Bruton
30 September Achuka
2 October Samantha Mackintosh
4 October An Awfully Big Blog Adventure
6 October Kate Maryon
8 October Barry Hutchinson
10 October My Favourite Books
12 October Joanna Nadin
14 October LA Weatherly
16 October Bath Festival of Children’s Literature

The Bath Festival of Children’s Literature runs for 10 days between 23 September- 2 October and will be packed full of events for all the family – highlights include the amazing Cressida Cowell, this year’s brochure cover illustrator David McKee, funny-man Andy Stanton and Pirates of the Caribbean actor Mackenzie Crook to name but a few.

Tickets can be booked by telephone 01225 463362, online at www.bathkidslitfest.org.uk or in person at Bath Box Office, 2 Church Street, Abbey Green, Bath BA1 1NL.

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We will be blogging and tweeting from the event, so do make sure to follow us on Twitter - @LizUK and @Gergaroth. We will be there the first weekend of 24th and 25th September.

Events / talks we will definitely be attending:

Simon Scarrow talking about Gladiator

Cressida Cowell

Eoin Colfer

Ally Carter

Philip Reeve & Moira Young

Celia Rees and Mary Hooper

Tony DiTerlizzi

Gladiator by Simon Scarrow

Rome, 61 BC

Recruited as a gladiator, young Marcus Cornelius Primus faces a new life of brutal training, governed by strict rules, as he learns the skills of an elite warrior.

But Marcus cannot simply forget his past. His father lies murdered by soldiers and his mother has been kidnapped and forced into slavery. Marcus is determined to find his father’s old commander, Pompeius the Great, to seek justice for his family and set his mother free.

Yet, unbeknown to him, Marcus is hiding a life-threatening secret. And if the Romans discover it, there will be no escape..

Fresh from the Rome fest of Vespasian, I was quite excited about Gladiator, given that it was penned by Simon Scarrow, whose Eagle Series has been top notch throughout. And besides, who doesn’t like Gladiators?

Gladiator opens well, with Marcus’ home under threat from a moneylender, creating some nice tension in the background as we get to grips with Marcus’ character. It’s a brief interlude before his journey into slavery begins, a journey that doesn’t offer any kind of concession for age or innocence.

That Scarrow is familiar with the Roman world is both subtle and obvious, even if you haven’t read any of his work before; it’s in the descriptions of life beyond Marcus’ immediate circle and the understanding of the casual disregard for slaves as anything except utilities.

However, as much as I wanted to really like Gladiator, there were a couple of bugbears I couldn’t quite work past. The first and most obvious is that it reads like Scarrow Lite, the rich narrative that won the Eagle Series so many fans having been diluted for a younger audience. And while I can sort of understand the reasoning behind it, I feel that it leaves Gladiator in a strange no man’s land where older readers could be turned off and middle grade readers talked down to. It is, of course, aimed at ages 11+, but I think that the ‘+’ is a very narrow range. The other, lesser thing was that I would have liked to have had more time spent on Marcus’ training, given the title et al; aside from the arena matches, that’s one of the things I was looking forward to. Of course, it could well be that this is something that will be picked up again later in the series, and I hope it is. Of course, and excuse the potential spoiler here, having him plucked out of the gladiator school after his first arena match could make this a bit trickier to pull off.

It’s a good concept with loads of potential, and while it's still a decent read, it needs more bite to make it stand out or realise that potential.