The LEGO Ultra Agents are a brand new series which has been released this Spring. We've been sent the Riverside Raid set 70160 to review.


The Riverside Raid set has 88 pieces, which include 2 minifigures of Adam Acid and Agent Max Burns, along with Max's 2-in-1 Quad Bike and Jet Speeder vehicle and 2 crates full of toxic compound.




The speed boat sits on the top of the quad bike, and lifts off really well. Although the speed boat fixes nicely, removal is clean and easy. Nothing comes apart at all, and you are left with 2 robust vehicles that withstand my 4 and 5 year olds playing with them no problem.




Included in the set are 2 crates with toxic compounds inside. They are nicely done with removable lids and handles for the minifigures and the winch. The winch can also be used to tow the jet speeder.


I'm incredibly impressed with this build, not least because it's really sturdy. The way the speed boat comes away is divine. The stud shooters might annoy some parents who find 'ammo' on the floor, but single stud bricks don't even hurt when you stand on them, so that's got to be a bonus!

LEGO have released a free interactive Ultra Agents story app. for Android and IOS where you take the part of the secret agent, creating your own ultra Agent avatar, searching for clues to solve crimes and complete missions and save Astor city from the super villains. 

With every mission you complete you get nearer to discovering the evil puppet master behind the super villains, and you can unlock alternative building instructions for existing models that can be downloaded as a PDF and saved.


The LEGO Ultra Agents Riverside Raid set retails at £9.99 and is available from the LEGO shop online or in store. For less than £10 I think this set offers excellent play value, as do all of the Ultra Agents sets. I just have to save up now to buy the Ultra Agents Mission HQ 70164!

Unlike Snakes and Ladders, each of the 2-4 players has their own board, and there are spaces at the end from where you can make an attempt at goal. When you reach the goal mouth, you 'shoot' by using a spinner. If the goalie is behind the ball, they save - if not, you score! 


During the game if you land on a Whistle Square then the whistle spinner comes into play. A yellow card sees you miss a turn, and a red card means back to the start. Landing on a free kick gives you another throw of the dice.


This is a game recommended for players aged 5+. My 5 year old is ill and sat this one out, so I decided to play with my 4 year old. As soon as his 16 year old brother saw the game, he offered to play instead.


Each game only takes around 5-10 minutes and it's really very fast-paced, especially with only 2 players. I think that's why the recommended age is so high. You can also feel quite demoralised if you get sent right back to the beginning, but my 4 year old was in a great mood, and in fact he won - shouting "Goal" and celebrating in true footballer style....



My 20 year old joined in at this point and they played about a bazillion more games over the next half hour, before realising that they could adapt the game really easily. I think this is one of the best things about Orchard Toys games, they're almost always ready and waiting to have new rules and adaptation depending on who plays.


By turning the boards end to end, the boys realised they have a large pitch with a goal at each end, and could expand the game and make it longer and harder to win. They decided to 'score' rather than have a winner after one goal, and their game became more and more complex. It ended up far beyond what my 4 year old could keep up with, but by this time he was enjoying the paper packaging that came in the box!


Orchard Toys Football Game is fantastically simple to grasp and great fun to play. It's quick and for the most part rewarding. It reinforces number skills and counting, but most of all it encourages the players to join in together with the excitement and pace of the game, and have a great time laughing and playing together.

Football Game entertained 3 of my boys for a good couple of hours and I'm sure it'll get plenty of play over the next few years. It's a perfect game for when you have 20 minutes and want something light and fun.

The new Summer 2014 LEGO ranges are out - Mixels Series 2, the Arctic LEGO City range and the Ultra Agents. LEGO have sent me a selection to try out and show you, and we're starting with the new LEGO Mixels Series 2.


We've been sent 41510 Lunk and 41513 Gobba. Mixels are available in sets of three, each set can be joined together to make a new larger Mixel - or just rebuilt however you fancy using all the great elements in the builds. There are 9 Mixels in each series, and in some of the bags you will find a bonus Nixel enemy! All Mixels are recommended for age 6+.







Gobba is one of the three Fang Gang Mixels. The Fang Gang are hungry Mixels who will plant anything to see if it will grow into food - and they'll eat just about anything, so I guess for the most part it usually will.






The Mixels were easy to build and my 5 1/2 year old was able to build them both by himself except for one fiddly bit with Lunk's belly. There are a lot of small elements that tiny hands can't put together or pull apart yet, so for that reason it's not possible for my 4 year old to build them yet - although he can sure play with them and rebuild to his own design!

I like these Mixels more than Series 1, they have more interesting movement.and loads of expression - but that could just be because I think Gobba is brilliant.

At £2.99 each I feel the LEGO Mixels offer excellent value for money. They're a brilliant toy for children and great for a collector or builder as they have so many interesting and rarer elements.

LEGO Mixels Series 2 are available from the LEGO shop online or in store and cost £2.99 each. You can catch the LEGO Mixels animated series on Cartoon Network. You can also join in the fun online and find loads of building instructions and designs at LEGO.com/Mixels

We love Green Toys. They're big, chunky, sturdy and most importantly they're made almost entirely from recycled materials. The Green Toys Recycling Truck is made from 100% recycled plastic milk bottles.


The packaging for Green Toys is fantastic, it tells you all kinds of useful information and is entirely recycled and recyclable cardboard. This means the toy can be removed quickly and safely, even by a small child. 
















The 2 boys play really quite complex games with the Recycling Truck. They fill it with sets of 3 items for 'recycling' - usually things like stones, sticks and grass. They'll then go and sort these items and put them into the 'correct place', so grass will go into our compost bin for example. I think it's an excellent way to make recycling a part of everyday life, nothing special or exciting as such, just something we all do.

This child chose his own bedding. He's colour-blind, he likes patterns!

This is a proper book with 74 pages split into 6 chapters. The chapters are fairly short and just the right size for a new reader to read before they begin to flag. It has challenging words and my Reception Class 5 year old would be too frustrated to read it alone, although after a read through with me he is happy to re-read by himself.

The text is large and well-spaced out, with not too many lines on a page. It's not an intimidating book and I think makes an excellent addition to the Orion Children's Books Early Reader range. Algy is very likeable, his adventures are fun, and my boys would be more than happy to find out where he and his friends go next!


We've been lucky enough to review a few Early Readers and other children's stories for Orion Books. All of my reviews can be found here on this page.

On the face of it Rik Mayall and Maya Angelou have very little in common.

One was an English actor, writer and comedian, who introduced me to subversive humour and really did give a good kick up the backside to all the safe and boring TV that we were all watching. 

One was an African-American author born in 1928 in St Louis, Missouri. Friend of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, and the person who taught me what racism and segregation and 'having a hard life' really meant.

They both had a place in my life at a very important stage. They were both there when I was a teenager. They wrote things that made me think and cry and laugh. They both left a mark and were people I respected very highly.


I was exactly the right age to be desperate to watch The Young Ones, but it was just after my bedtime. I was 11, anxious to fit in and be at least a tiny bit cool. I missed the first series, but when it came back 18 months later I was there - I already knew all the characters and storylines by then, it was the stuff of legends. The show was the best thing on the TV for any 12 year old in their first year at High School.

Rik Mayall stayed on my TV screen for years. The Comic Strip and Kick Up The Eighties cast were the alternative stars who made it mainstream. They changed TV, they changed TV comedy, they brought politics and anarchy to early evening viewing. They took risks and for the most part it worked.

In 1991 I went on my one and only weekend away in London. We stayed in a Hotel and went to see a show. In fact we went to see Waiting For Godot - with Rik Mayall, Ade Edmonson and Christopher Ryan. It was completely different to anything I'd seem them in before, and it was brilliant.

Maya Angelou I read as part of my English Language A Level. I thought I was politically aware and as I was living pretty much independently already, I felt I was more mature and had experienced more than most of my peers who lived with their parents and didn't have to go to work before and after College.

Maya proved that anyone can do anything. My life had never been so bad, I had advantages she'd never had.  She really did show why the caged bird sings. Her books made me cry and laugh and I got to know a woman I'd never meet, a woman who had never given in.

Maya lived a life far longer than could have been forseen when she was a child. Despite the hard knocks she was an impressive 86 when she went, and I think she had probably ticked off that job as done.

Rik never recovered fully from driving his quad bike into a tree in 1998. Brain injuries are invisible for the most part, and when the initial recovery is done, everyone thinks you're all better. They don't see the tiredness, the depression and the frustration. Rik's long term memory and his temperament were affected and I guess only his widow will know just exactly how much was lost or broken. He was only 56 and ready or not, both are unfavourable.

In the same week as Maya Angelou said her goodbye I lost a friend. Someone I first met around 10 years ago. A huge man with a great big voice and I never saw him do anything other than smile. He was brilliant at Karaoke and could make the whole room silent when he sang. He loved to laugh and every minute was for enjoying. He was barely 40, he wasn't finished.

As I get older I am painfully aware of the increasing speed at which my friends and heroes are leaving. The movie stars and performers who used to grace my walls are beginning to slip away. Several people who were with me at school have now died, 3 in the last year. What I'm also realising is that these people may not be here standing with us any more, but they're never gone.

“I feel sorry for you, you zeros, you nobodies. What’s going to live on after you die? Nothing, that’s what! This house will become a shrine! And punks and skins and Rastas will all gather round and all hold their hands in sorrow for their fallen leader! And all the grown-ups will say, ‘But why are the kids crying?’ And the kids will say, ‘Haven’t you heard? Rick is dead! The People’s Poet is dead!’ ... And then one particularly sensitive and articulate teenager will say, ‘Why kids, do you understand nothing? How can Rick be dead when we still have his poems?’”Rik Mayall as Rick in The Young Ones episode Bambi.

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”Maya Angelou.

Coincidentally while I was taking a break from typing this I noticed I wasn't the only one to have the very same thoughts....Boo, Roo and Tigger Too.

Geek Girl 3, Picture Perfect is the 3rd book in the series by Holly Smale. It follows on from Geek Girl and Model Misfit, continuing the tales of Harriet Manners - the 'geek girl'. Geek Girl was the UK Children's no.1 debut book of 2013, and winner of the teen category of the Waterstones Children's Books Prize 2014.


The 3rd book in the series and I won't spoil it for you, but we see Harriet and her family move to the US. It's a book full of humour and rarely takes itself very seriously.

Aimed especially at young women aged around 11+, my 14 year old daughter has read the 1st book in the series but not the 2nd, and now reading the 3rd book she felt it is not necessary to have read the others first in order to enjoy Picture Perfect, it works on it's own.


Here are the main points from her review -

• Best for age 13+
• Lots of big words like 'propitiously' unlike lots of boring teen books
• Relatable to girls 13-16
• Funny and upsetting
• Makes you want to read the whole series
• Not the same as all of the other 'teen' books and shows you the world from a 'geek' point of view, however still has the enemy, best friend, boyfriend, the love triangle and the parents she feels she hates. 
• Double thumbs up
• Ending makes you cry

This book is mainly aimed at pre-teen and teenage girls and we think it hits the mark just right. The language is grown up and doesn't condescend, but the themes are not too mature. My daughter read it in 2 days, and at 400 pages I think that's a good measure of how much she enjoyed it.

Geek Girl 3, Picture Perfect (hardback edition) is published by HarperCollins Children's Books and has an RRP of £12.99. It is currently available on Amazon for £6.00.

I'm delighted to be able to offer a copy of Geek Girl 3, Picture Perfect as a prize for one of my readers. Entry is by Rafflecopter below. The giveaway will end at midnight on Sunday 29th June. UK entries only please. Terms and conditions are shown at the bottom of the Rafflecopter form.

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