Flour Babies is a day school novel for young adults, written by Anne Fine and published by Hamilton 1992. It features a group "science experiment" in a classroom full of poor students (underachievers). "When his class of underachievers is assigned to spend three torturous weeks taking care of their own "babies" in the form of bags of flour, Simon makes amazing discoveries about himself while coming to terms with his long-absent father."
Fine won the annual Carnegie Medal in Literature from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. She is one of seven writers with two such honors (no one has won three), having won the 1986 Medal for Goggle-Eyes. The earlier book uses a day school frame to recount a story of family life.
Little, Brown published the first U.S. edition in 1994. The teachers were renamed and the students were moved from "class 4C" to "Room 8" for the American audience. Some libraries report the title Flour babies and the boys of Room 8.
Read more about Flour Babies: Synopsis, Name Device
Famous quotes containing the words flour and/or babies:
“Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff of any degree of fineness; but nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat- flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)