A beginner chapter book The Magic School Bus Voyage to the Volcano is a fun tale of what happens when the kids and Miss Fizz venture to visit the volcanoes in Hawaii. Book 2 has some intrigue and sub-plots that Book 1 only hints at. If that had been in book 1, it could have been a lot better. At least there would have been something except a complete setup and choppity chop deus ex ending.

When Jacob and his three best friends head down to the beach on the Jurassic Coast one day, they make a surprising discovery! I enjoyed the story, character development, and dialogue. There were plenty of plot twists that I didn’t see coming and that added to the book’s mystique. When I stopped reading to work, I found myself wondering what happened in the book, and replaying parts of the story in my head to see if I could figure more out. It has been a while since I enjoyed a book this much. It’s a first-class sci-fi thriller with perfect pacing. I had a bit of trouble with the characters in this book. Agent Agatha Devenworth is cold-hearted, a smug know-it-all, who hates having partners. She is very good at her job but nothing exists but the job. Her partner Pano is a young guy who thinks very highly of himself and is always hinting about a potential sexual romp with Agatha. Read a chapter of the fossils story at the end of the day, as part of an English topic on story writing or as a guided reading text. Imagine going to a restaurant, starving, but instead of a meal, you're served really small appetizers. And not tasty at that.

There's actually a good book in here, somewhere. The premise of the novel in itself is very promising and exciting, but the author either didn't know what to do with it, or decided to make the first book an entire setup to sell the entire trilogy (yes, of course it's a trilogy! FFS...) Fossil Capital is a theoretical masterpiece and a political-economic-ecological manifesto. It looks unblinkingly at the catastrophe that could await human society if we fail to act on the words System Change or Climate Change. It is a book that I will return to again and again—and take notes. John Bellamy Foster, University of Oregon, author of Marx’s Ecology Learn about the history of people discovering fossils and the coining of the term dinosaur. (more) See all videos for this article That's what defines Calvert's approach to method writing: pushing himself beyond his own limits, to experience first-hand what his characters experience, to make your immersion in his stories as deep as it can be. If you enjoyed reading 'Phyllis and the Fossil Finders', we have a library of Twinkl Originals eBooks you'll love.

To begin with, I must say I very much enjoyed this thriller. Having recently read The Martian, I was excited to have a go at this novel with its Martian links. And I'm happy to report, although it's very different to Andy Weir’s book, it's very, very good. In fact, I think I might have just discovered a new author to enjoy. This impressive book speaks to several emergent areas in ecocriticism: material ecocriticism, the ubiquitous Anthropocene, environmental history, ‘Victorian Ecology’ … Such a formidable body of historical evidence has the potential to ignite both ‘Victorian ecology’ and a more socially engaged ecocriticism. John Parnham, Green Letters: Studies in EcocriticismWhy not use these guided reading questions to go alongside the text, or this fossilisation activity to introduce how fossils are made?