Floodland

Product Information

She lands on tiny Eels Island, where she must survive in a nightmarish world run by wild children, and stand up to its boy-leader, Dooby. With both your publisher and author hat on, what advice can you give would-be children's authors in getting published?

Also, I think this book was mainly focusing on how the water is getting higher and lands getting smaller. Although, the purpose of this was to read the book and create activities around it, I found that I was drawn into the book and constantly wanting to know what was going to happen next.

She finds her way to Eel Island, a place where mobs rule in a bid for survival in a dark, dank graveyard of a world. I found the end to be a bit of an anti-climax after all the drama building in the first ¾ of the book. Despite its bleakness the story itself is very good and has a very believable plot it’s just that Zoe is all over the place as far as her character goes and on top of that it seems like the story starts and ends in the middle.

I read this over a weekend so I could use it as a stimulus for the English work the children in the year 6 class I was working with were going to do. I would highly recommend this book not only to use as a stimulus but as a read because it really gets you thinking. I am teaching this to my year 6 class and it has been a great success as it totally engages its readers and is topical and relevant.

The most recent of these nominations rekindled a fascination with Poe that has borne fruit here in (in The Restless Dead, 2007) the form of "The Heart of Another" - inspired by Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart. Even though it takes so many years for an island to completely sink, I noticed that if we don't have any interest on global warming, things will go much faster than we expected. In fact, I think I like the story-telling more this way than if another hundred or so pages of explanation and backstories had been added: the reader has to make some leaps along the way.

Marcus has been shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal five times, the Edgar Allan Poe Award (twice) and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize (four times). Alone and desperate among marauding gangs, she manages to dig a derelict boat out of the mud and get away to Eels Island.Set on the east coast of England after the sea has risen and flooded much of East Anglia, Floodland tells the story of ten year old Zoe who has lost her parents in a confusing rescue mission from her home island of Norwich. She fetches up on the remote and sinking Eels Island where there is a barbarous community, and to find out whether she ever gets off Eels Island and whether she ever finds her parents again you will have to read the book. Well, if the country got smaller when the sea rose, then there ought to be more people squashed into what's left.