He began to smile and dribble, / for he liked the wibble-wobble of the bubble in the air. Pandemonium ensues when Mabel's bubble breaks away, enveloping her baby brother, and taking him on an extraordinary flight: 'The baby didn't quibble. But truly and sadly, from a total and complete personal reading pleasure point of departure and view, I have definitely found Bubble Trouble a bit ho-hum and much too tediously drawn out (and therefore, its Boston Globe Horn Book Award notwithstanding, for me, three stars is the absolute maximum I am willing to consider for Bubble Trouble). Still an entertainingly engaging enough little interlude is Bubble Trouble (and likely because of the rollicking poetry, with ample plays on words and fun alliterations a perfect choice for a read aloud, although my ageing eyes do rather wish that the font size had been a trifle larger and the letters a bit thicker in circumference). Now even though upon commencing with Margaret Mahy's Bubble Trouble, I was indeed smiling and very much enjoying both the fantastically hilarious premise of a little baby stuck in a large bubble and floating away and the humorously engaging, songlike rhymes (although I have to say that occasionally, the cadence and rhythm of Mahy's featured verses do have the annoying tendency to turn and feel a wee bit frustratingly uneven), sorry, but really, the actual featured storyline of Bubble Trouble, it just seems to go on and on for much too long, and yes, by the end of Bubble Trouble, I was actually getting both quite massively bored and thus also more than mildly peeved (especially since I also have not really aesthetically enjoyed Polly Dunbar's accompanying illustrations all that much either and have indeed even found that their garish gaudiness actually often seems to majorly distract me from the author's, from Margaret Mahy's verses, and so much so that I more than once have had to actually force myself to refocus my eyes back onto the actual text, back onto the verses themselves). 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.

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'.

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 addition, some stories have been translated into Russian, Chinese and Icelandic.įor her contributions to children's literature she was made a member of the Order of New Zealand. Her novels have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Catalan and Afrikaans. 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. There have 100 children's books, 40 novels, and 20 collections of her stories published. Her books The Haunting and The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance both received the Carnegie Medal of the British Library Association. While the plots of many of her books have strong supernatural elements, her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growing up.

Margaret Mahy was a well-known New Zealand author of children's and young adult books.

Bubble trouble book