Tomorrow the Nosy Crow Guardian Reading Group will be back for its first meeting of 2014, to discuss the Guardian children’s fiction prize-winner Liar and Spy by Rebecca Stead – and we’d love for you to join in!
Although places for the physical event are all gone, if you’d like to take part you can follow our progress on Twitter with the #NCGKids hashtag, and by leaving your comments underneath this blogpost. There’s a particularly insightful review of the book by The Grunts author Philip Ardagh on The Guardian website here, and as usual we’ve prepared a few discussion points to get you thinking in advance – here’s some of what we might talk about:
1) Who do you think this book is for?
2) What do you make of Stead’s portrayals of school and home life?
3) While a number of the themes in Liar and Spy are present on the surface, many only exist as subtext. How successfully do you think the book balances each of its ideas? What do you think it is “about”?
4) How important do you think “plot” is in the book?
5) A recurring theme in Liar and Spy is rejecting (or subverting) orthodoxy and authority. Who do you think the eponymous Liar is? And who (or what) is Georges and Safer’s chief adversary?
You can buy Liar and Spy from the Guardian Bookshop here – and you can also read an extract from the book on The Guardian’s website here.
We hope you can join us!
