Alfie and the Birthday Surprise

Product Description


Birthday parties always make people happy, and Alfie's neighbor, Mr. MacNally, really does need cheering up. Alfie thinks a party might be just the thing, and there's an extra special surprise in store for Mr. MacNally! Will Alfie manage to keep it a secret?


From School Library Journal


Kindergarten-Grade 2?When Bob MacNally's cat dies, he is so sad that he doesn't even want to celebrate his 52nd birthday. His daughter, Maureen, and their irrepressible preschool neighbor Alfie decide to cheer Bob up by throwing a surprise party. The day before the event, Maureen gets her father a kitten. In order to keep her present a surprise, Alfie hides it overnight in his bedroom but finds it tough to sleep while the curious animal explores and plays. This is an endearing story about friendship. The death aspect is understated and does not overwhelm the story or Alfie himself. The illustrations are muted with clear lines set against soft backgrounds and feature Hughes's familiar cherublike characters. Purchase where the other books about Alfie are popular.?Christy Norris Blanchette, Valley Cottage Library, NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


About the Author


Shirley Hughes was trained at Liverpool Art School and at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. She illustrated many books by other authors before she started to write her own picture books. Her own family, two sons and a daughter, were very young then and she learned the craft of storytelling mostly by reading to them. Her books have won many awards and are published in Europe, China, Japan, and the Far East, as well as Australia, Canada, the U. K., and the U. S. A. She travels widely, talking to and drawing for children in schools and libraries as well as at adult conventions.
Shirley is married to an architect, now retired, and they have lived in the same family house, overlooking a London square garden, for more than forty years. They have, to date, six grandchildren who keep them on their toes.In Her Own Words...
"I grew up in a nice, quiet, well-behaved suburb of Liverpool. But our uneventful lives were rudely interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Wewent to school carrrying gas masks, did air-raid shelter drills, saved Up mountains of scrap metal, and attempted to knit Mufflers for the troops. (Mine were very long; I never quite got the hang of casting off.)I slept under the stairs (hiring the winter of the big blitz, when we saw the sky over Liverpool lit by searchlights, tracer bullets, and Fires from the burning docks.
"All this may sound very exciting, But the problem with wartime is that when it's not frightening, it's deadly dull. You can't go on holiday, the grown-ups are too harassed and exhausted to pay much attention to amusements, and every nice kind of food is scarce. I recall, on a rare trip to the seaside (the beach was out of bounds, full of barbed wire and concrete gun emplacements), gazing at a longempty slot machine which had held chocolate bars and now seemed like a rusting icon from another world.
"Nevertheless, we managed to have a good time. We drew a lot, read and wrote stories, and got up magazines. (Mine was called, rather unoriginally, 'Girl's Own.) We acted plays, dressed in homemade costumes, to any audience we could press into service, cats included. Later, we became hopelessly stageand movie-struck. I think that by accident I had an ideal childhood for an illustrator. In a pre-televisual age, our Sunday afternoon outings, if we were lucky, were to Liverpool Art Gallery, which was cram-full of Victorian an narrative paintings with titles like 'The Hopeless Dawn,' 'Too Late!,' and 'When Did You Last See Your Father?' Tremendous stuff, and it fueled my lifelong conviction that stories and pictures belong together. I think most children probably feel the same.
"With me, drawing and painting stuck. I was never much good at anything else, so I went on doing them. Writing was a secret thing, kept well under wrap