Review: Jack Dash and the Summer Blizzard

Hello everyone!

Hope you’ve all had a lovely weekend. Today I’m reviewing Jack Dash and the Summer Blizzard by Sophie Plowden which was very kindly sent to me by Catnip Publishing via Bounce Marketing (which did not affect my opinion of the book or the content of this review). Let’s get started!

As I haven’t read the first book in this series, I wasn’t really sure what to expect going in, but I was very pleasantly surprised by this book.

It tells the story of a boy called Jack, who owns a magical feather quill which brings anything he draws with it to life, as he starts his new school (run by the most evil headmistress I’ve read since Miss Trunchbull in Roald Dahl’s Matilda) and tries to stay out of trouble by hiding the feather.

Everything goes wrong however, when his neighbour Coco McBean takes the feather and draws a penguin called Pablo (who was very cute, but also causes a lot of problems for Jack and Coco) and everything gets worse from there…

The two main characters  Jack and Coco were really sweet, and even though I hadn’t read the first book I found it very easy to understand their personalities and their friendship.

The surrounding characters were also well written and all felt very different to each other, and it was mainly the dialogue between them which made me laugh when reading (and also pretty much every scene with Pablo).

Another thing I liked about this book was the concept itself, as most books with a plot like this end up being very dark and danger filled,  but this felt super sweet and fun, despite characters such as the previously mentioned horrible headmistress Miss Frostbite.

I loved how the plot develops in this book too, and there were a lot of scenes that really made me smile as Jack and Coco tried to solve the problem of Pablo the penguin in increasingly desperate ways.

Finally, the fantastic illustrations by Judy Brown really added to the book and it’s humour, and I’d recommend this to parents/teachers looking for a fun chapter book to read aloud (Jack Dash would be especially good for this as it has sound effects in bold, which I think children would have joining in with, and I think it would also be perfect for fans of Karen McCombie’s younger fiction series such as You, Me and Thing and St Grizzle’s.

4/5 stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟

 

 

 

 

Advertisement