The Royal Wedding Crashers

Posted on 17/05/2015 by clembeauvais

The Royal Wedding Crashers is out!

and it’s bigger than its older brother

I celebrated by writing a blog post for LoveReading 4 Kids about Ten French Children’s Books that are Available in English!

But don’t buy all those French books just yet or else you’ll have no time to read the most excellent second instalment in the adventures of Holly, Anna and Prince Pepino, illustrated as always by the royally energetic Becka Moor.

The Royal Wedding Crashers takes our three jobseekers all the way to Parii, in Francia, to help organise the wedding of Princess Violette to the mysterious King Dentu of Romany. Any resemblance to real people or places is of course purely coincidental.

Mademoiselle Malypense and her poodle Kiki-Bisou are the new employers of Holly, Anna and Pepino, and they occasionally protect the little prince against the beheading tendencies of the vicious Pariisians:

Parii is the favourite city of Tourists; Holly, Anna and Pepino will encounter one or more flocks of this strange tribe:

Will the three children figure out what Mademoiselle Malypense’s true intentions are in organising this wedding?

Will Pepino survive being trapped in Catacombs for several hours without ice-cream?

Will they manage to avoid the mobs of angry Francians who demand their daily bread?

Will they finally get paid?

To know all this and much more (such as how to steer a rooster-drawn carriage through the skies), there’s only one solution, and you know what it is…

And if you like posters and colouring packs, head right there on Bloomsbury’s website, where you can download those things, and also read the first chapter of the book…

And if you’d like to know a bit more about the French translation of the books, I wrote a blog post about it a little while ago. I’m sure the French will be delighted to translate the second one as well. I’m sure they won’t expel me from the country forever. I’m sure they won’t try to behead me. I’m sure they’ll let me eat cake.

A bientôt!

A Very Royal Book Birthday

Posted on 11/09/2014 by clembeauvais

Happy book birthday to The Royal Babysitters, which is coming out today with Bloomsbury and illustrated by Becka Moor!

Featuring Holly, Pepino and Anna

The Royal Babysitters is basically a secret ode to royalty and to the benefits of earning money through hard work from a very young age. Yep, that’s me, monarchy-worshipping and dirty capitalist all the way.

It’s all about little Anna and Holly Burnbright, who are not so happy with their forced staycation (they’re not very rich, because their dad disappeared years ago in the beak of a pelican, and their mum is a writer of ABC books paid 1 pound per letter). And it gets worse when the two sisters spot an advert for an incredible Holy-Moly Holiday involving volcano scuba-diving and baby-elephant polo.

Therefore, they have to find a summer job to buy tickets to that holiday.

A summer job comes in the form of royal babysitting: it so happens that today is the King and Queen of Britland’s annual day of leave to the Independent Republic of Slough, and they need someone to look after their rather energetic princes. Anna and Holly are ideal for the job (well, they aren’t, but no one else wants to do it.) At the Royal Palace they meet the charming little Prince Pepino, who’s not exactly the bravest prince in the world but has a cool felt-tip-drawn watch on his wrist that always says it’s ice-cream time.

As if their job wasn’t complicated enough, King Alaspooryorick of Daneland, who’s always been jealous of the King and Queen of Britland’s indoor swimming-pool and cellar full of Francian cheeses, has decided that today is the perfect day for an invasion.

Will Pepino, Anna and Holly manage to repel the invasion?

Will all the princes survive?

Will the Royal Cow be refrigerated in time?

Will King Steve of Britland manage to jump from the highest diving-board at the swimming pool of the Independent Republic of Slough?

You will know the answers to all these stressful questions if you gift the book to a young human and then read it to him or her (doing a big voice for King Alaspooryorick, a little peremptory one for Anna, etc.; and making it sound animated and hilarious; I trust you are fully able to read a book out loud to a child in an interesting way, or else they might not find it funny and all my efforts will be ruined; so please do your best.)

You can even read the first four pages, look:

The second book in this perfectly nonsensical series will be called The Royal Wedding-Crashers, and will come out in April 2015. In the meantime you may reread The Royal Babysitters a thousand times, or pick up the Sesame Seade series (DOUBLE PROMOTION BLOG POST ALERT).

Sesame lurking under the Royal Babysitters

Or plan your own invasion of some faraway land.

I will be touring some schools and doing some festivals to meet future readers of this extremely educational book in the next few weeks. Full report to follow!

Clem x

Some Royal News

Posted on 21/01/2014 by clembeauvais

Having read quite a few children’s books since I was born (they’re generally pretty good, you should try them), I recently became dissatisfied. Yes, dear readers, dissatisfied. Because none of them, no – none of the books I’d read ever gathered the following ten things all together in the same story:

Windsurfing starfish
Sextuplet princes (of toddlerish age) (crowns equipped with elastic bands)
A foreign king obsessed with blitz invasions (finished in time for dinner)
Hummingbird cannons
An amazing holiday including a trip to a Mars bar
A babysitting job paid one thousand pounds a day
A naked porcupine
A knitted parachute
A lift especially designed for a cow
A day of leave at the Independent Republic of Slough.

I was extremely sad about this oversight, because it appears to me that no children’s book can ever be quite complete without these ten things.

So I decided to write it!

And since other people agreed that the children’s literature world could not survive much longer without these ten things all neatly folded into a children’s book, it will be published as the first book in a series, by Bloomsbury, in September 2014!

(NB The lovely people at Bloomsbury, as a welcome present, having somehow heard from somewhere that I didn’t dislike one of their series, gave me this brand new Harry Potter box set -)

now I'll have to reread them for the 67th time... oh well!

uh-oh, now I’ll have to reread them for the 67th time. Ah well!

The first volume of my own series, meanwhile, will be called The Royal Babysitters.

Based on a true story. (not)

What’s the pitch? Bickering sisters Anna and Holly, along with rather clueless little prince Pepino, have to look after six little princes for just one day – yes, but a day chosen by the bloodthirsty King Alaspooryorick of Daneland to invade the country.

A rather tough job, then, but you see, they have to earn some serious money to pay for the unbelievably cool Holy-Moly-Holiday that they’ve seen advertised in the newspaper. .

The second book in the series doesn’t have a name yet but it will be out in April 2015.

And it all takes place in a world… not quite like our own.

“But what age is it for?” asks the anxious adult. “From your description, it sounds like it could be for anyone between seven and a quarter and eight and a half! I need it to be more precise!!!”

It will be, I think, intended for children who are just getting to grips with the Art of Reading (well done them), though once again, like the Sesame books, I have written them carefully so they won’t immediately burn the neurons of anyone at a different stage of literacy.

And, what is supermuchmore exciting, it will be what I believe my friend and colleague Eve Tandoi would call a hybrid book series, that is to say a book where words and pictures both tell the story. It’s not quite a comic and it’s not quite a picturebook, but it’s somewhere in between, and I think it’s going to be hugely fun once the pictures are all drawn.

And it will be edited by none other than the extraordinary Ellen Holgate, who had already picked my Sesame at Hodder before moving to Bloomsbury. All those of you who’ve read Sesame books know how beautifully conceived and designed they are, so I’m ferociously excited that she’s working on the series too.

I hope you’re looking forward to it too. In fact I hope you’re now considering making lots of new babies in order to have an excuse to read them this series and then the Sesame Seade books. I’ll leave you to do that, then. I’ll just leave you to it.

Clem x

Just a Sprinkling of Sesame

Posted on 20/03/2012 by clembeauvais

Et voilà! first post on my new English author blog. I’ve never had an author blog in English before, because I’ve never been an author in English before – so my only author blog until now was in French, like my published children’s books. And like myself (it happens to the best of us).

But sacrebleu, last year to keep myself busy I knitted a little novel-looking sort of story with the finest English wool, with characters in it and a bit of blue and green background to make it look all geek chic on windy winter days, and lo and behold, the curiousest thing has happened that has made it absolutely completely necessary and tremendously compulsory for me to start an author blog in English: a book deal. I know, I wasn’t sure they existed either. But there you go, here it is, it’s with Hodder Children’s Books, and it’s a fairly good excuse for a first blog post, I think.

And this fairly good excuse is called Sesame Seade! (though bizarrely her parents are convinced that she’s really called Sophie). Sesame is an eleven-year-old roller-skating self-made superheroine with as many connections in her brain as there are stars in the universe. She’d quite like a pet duck. Her parents aren’t keen (they won’t even consider a duckling). Professor Seade (Mum) is a Pharmacologist and Reverend Seade (Dad) is a Chaplain, and both of them are ever so slightly baffled by their wunderkind. Especially when she turns super-sleuth to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Jenna Jenkins…

And all this happens in quite a nice little corner of the world called Cambridge (which I vaguely know, I looked it up on Wikipedia once), and it’s a series of humour, mystery and adventure (all at the same time) featuring happy ducks, a yellow boat, a flock of ballet dancers, a notable absence of tangy tangerine strings, strange professors, sleepy students, and above all a hyperactive heroine with two best friends and a sometimes dangerous cat.

The first book in the series will be published in April 2013! It’s mainly for fun-loving kids who blew out eight, nine, ten or eleven candles at their last birthday party – but I’m fairly sure that reading it won’t kill anyone with better- or less-well-lit celebratory cakes.

More soon! but I promise this won’t be a blog about solely Myself and Sesame Seade. Just like my French blog, there will be A Lot More about Children’s Literature In General. Because that’s what I love.