8 books like Opal's Springtime Birdhouse

It’s a fractured fairy-tale featuring three classic fairy-tale characters: Wolfred, Zinderella, and the Non-Evil Queen. This charming book provides a reassuring, empowering perspective on mistakes and perseverance. The vibrant illustrations match the humorous tone of the story, in whole it reminds kid readers to take their mistakes in stride. In The School of Failure where the trio encounter failure and disappointment, they receive support and encouragement to keep trying, and discover that with patience and persistence, mistakes can also lead to the perfect storybook ending. It sets a supporting role model for schools and classes.

Yara is a girl with a passion for science who is determined to make new discoveries. The book has educational back matter explaining the scientific method of making new discoveries and lays out each step in the process clearly that young readers can follow. It will inspire children to start experimenting on their own. Like every good scientist, Yara starts with a question, makes observations, and comes up with a hypothesis... but each time she starts an experiment, her dog, Renzo, ruins it! Yara sets a great example for young readers to pursue scientific studies. In this humorous story, there is clear evidence that scientific method works as well for dogs as for people. 

It’s a funny egg tale. Humphrey has long known the cautionary tale of his grandfather, Humpty Dumpty. Eggs are fragile and bought specifically to be cracked... but what if they don’t want to be cracked and have their own ambitions and goals for life, like becoming a great egg-splorer? Humphrey’s daring and determination to become a great explorer allows him to come up with creative solutions to his problem. His imagination knows no bounds and creates delightful spreads sure to appeal to readers. This rollicking story expands the famous tale of a fragile egg to a new story about bravery, creativity, and forging your own path.

The girl protagonist loves to make things from her various wild ideas. Her brain is an “idea machine.” Then one day… the girl can’t come up with a single idea for what to make. She tries everything: brainstorming, gathering new supplies, even jumping to shake an idea loose. But nothing works. The author ingeniously captures the ups and downs of the creative process. This book offers a terrific character education lesson in patience and perseverance. It will inspire young makers and visionary creators and encourage them to believe that an idea is sure to come if they just give it the opportunity.

I find it difficult to walk past second-hand bookshops and charity shops and often find myself drawn to the antique books and children’s adventure books from the 19th and 20th century. The older, the better, and if they are about stones, pebbles, or gemstones, whether fact or fiction, I find them hard to resist. One of my recent finds, this book was published in 1960 and is an adventure story. It is part of The Boys’ and Girls’ Library—School and adventure stories by well-known authors.

I love the excitement and adventure that the boys get up to and their well-meaning antics, which usually land them in some dire situation that they either have to escape from or be rescued from. And there’s plenty for me to learn about the life of the opal miners and the geology.

I admit it—I’m a fangirl. I caught up with Chris Hammer at my local library and had a photo taken with him. This book spans multiple timelines, from 1913 to the present.

As if that wasn’t enough, it’s set in a small Australian town where secrets, intrigue, and lies always abound. If that didn’t tick all my boxes, nothing could! 

This is the book that I wish I had written. So many times I have thought about going on the travels that Victoria followed, but life got in the way, and I never made the all the journeys. Reading the book and following Victoria’s quest, even as an "armchair traveller," really brought the stories of the gemstones alive and answered questions that I had about the people, the places, and the politics of gemstones and the jewellery trade.

I loved that she started out with a simple idea, to find out more about her engagement ring, and then how much more she became interested in along the way and how her travels impacted her knowledge of gemstones and her outlook on life.

Perhaps a surprise choice! For it tells things not from the perspective of someone who has committed a crime, or been in jail, but from that of a real prison officer.

In that sense, the writer has actually been in prison, and reading it makes you think that those who work in such places are in some ways serving sentences of their own. As a prisoner, it was sometimes easy to see ‘the screws’ all in the same way, but doing so is no less erroneous and one-dimensional than seeing all prisoners as the same.

Likewise, I found the book to succeed in portraying many of the misunderstood nuances of prison life, and the challenges those inside face – on both sides of the system – to achieve redemption.