Bubble Trouble & Other Poems and Stories

by Margaret Mahy

A whimsical anthology of stories and poems presents the hilarious mishaps and misadventures of a zany cast of characters, including a lovesick crocodile, a bouncing grandmother, and a gargling gorilla.

Contains:

Bubble Trouble
The Runaway Reptiles
Hiccups
The Gargling Gorilla
The Springing Granny

66 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Margaret Mahy was a well-known New Zealand author of children's and young adult books. While the plots of many of her books have strong supernatural elements, her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growing up.

Her books The Haunting and The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance both received the Carnegie Medal of the British Library Association. There have 100 children's books, 40 novels, and 20 collections of her stories published. Among her children's books, A Lion in the Meadow and The Seven Chinese Brothers and The Man Whose Mother was a Pirate are considered national classics. Her novels have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Catalan and Afrikaans. In addition, some stories have been translated into Russian, Chinese and Icelandic.

For her contributions to children's literature she was made a member of the Order of New Zealand. The Margaret Mahy Medal Award was established by the New Zealand Children's Book Foundation in 1991 to provide recognition of excellence in children's literature, publishing and literacy in New Zealand. In 2006 she was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award (known as the Little Nobel Prize) in recognition of a "lasting contribution to children's literature".

Margaret Mahy died on 23 July 2012.

On 29 April 2013, New Zealand’s top honour for children’s books was renamed the New Zealand Post Margaret Mahy Book of the Year award.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret...

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much cooler than the single story. I like Mahy's lively scribbles as illustrations.

There's enough here to keep a family busy for at least a week. All but the last are silly fun... read them aloud for the tickle, then again for a bigger laugh, but probably not ever for anything more memorable.

Otoh, the last story, "The Springing Granny," is not only silly and fun to read aloud but is also quite lovely. Maybe it's because I am feeling more and more vulnerable to the weary feelings caused by being old and by winter's cold & dark, but I empathize with the granny who crafts a tropical setting 'round her cocoon... and I find what happened when the grandchildren got frustrated with her to be inspirational.

Recommended to kids and families for the first four stories, and to all ages for the final fable.

[Michael Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mahy has a special talent for prolonging things - tales like "Hiccups" stretch and expand, building so much tension. She also can be trusted to have a rewarding and satisfying payoff at the end. Mahy's illustration isn't the equal of her fine text, though.