Get­ting back on track with some Irish award-winners. There by Marie-Louise Fitz­patrick was named The Bisto Book of the Year for 2009 and also received an Hon­our Award for Illus­tra­tion. It is a quiet and thought­ful book per­fect for shar­ing one-on-one, but also filled with a child’s spunk and sense of won­der. In a series of ques­tions, a girl pon­ders what and where “There” is and what it might bring. The illus­tra­tions are really lovely, cap­tur­ing the vary­ing moods of the girl’s ques­tions perfectly.

The chap­ter book awards from Ire­land are dom­i­nated by Kate Thomp­son and Siob­han Dowd. Hav­ing already read Dowd for the Carnegie Medal and ador­ing Thompson’s The New Police­man when it first came out, I wanted to try a dif­fer­ent author. As a fan of both his­tor­i­cal fic­tion and the Nether­lands, the 2003/2004 win­ner, Wings Over Delft, by Aubrey Flegg made the cut. I’ll try to avoid this approach for future coun­try awards as my mind was in the Nether­lands rather than Ire­land and I don’t feel like I’ve done Ire­land jus­tice! As wealthy Louise Eedeen sits for her por­trait before an expected (but not eagerly antic­i­pated) mar­riage, she enjoys what she hopes will not be her last oppor­tu­nity to explore sci­ence, phi­los­o­phy and art. Flegg cap­tures the spirit of inquiry dur­ing the Dutch Golden Age and the Puri­tan­ni­cal social expec­ta­tions it lived along­side. Unfor­tu­nately the book ends so abruptly as to leave me shak­ing my head. While it is the first in a tril­ogy, the sequel does not take place until over one hun­dred years later so I do not expect that the abrupt­ness is resolved to my sat­is­fac­tion in the sec­ond book.

These books were read as part of the Award-Winning Book Chal­lenge. See what oth­ers have been read­ing in Sep­tem­ber at Gath­er­ing Books.