Wonderful storyteller Ursula Jones tells the story of the Nutcracker, and his noble attempt to defeat the evil Mouse King and his army. Marie will never forget the Christmas the Nutcracker arrives, but can he live up to her expectations?

Ruby/Band 14 books give increasing opportunities for children to develop their skills of inference and deduction.

Text type: A traditional tale

Curriculum links: English: fairy stories, myths and legends

This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book is part of a book series called Collins Big Cat .

. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 48 pages in this book. This book was published 2016 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Ursula Jones is an award-winning author and actress. She has written many books for children, including The Witch's Children and the Queen , winner of the Nestle Gold Award, and The Witch's Children go to School , winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize. Ursula lives in London and France. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Mariano Epelbaum is a Character Designer, illustrator and traditional 2D animator. Working professionally since 1996 in various disciplines of Animation and Illustration where characters that designs tend to be very expressive and original. Currently in art direction on several projects, always trying different styles and techniques. As an animation artist, participated in outstanding productions in Argentina, as Character art director and character designer of Foosball, Argentine-Spanish 3D production directed by Juan Jose Campanella, Garcia Ferre movies Manuelita and Corazon, las alegrias de Pantriste; Micaela (Encuadre SA), Bahia Magica (Bitt Animation), the three films "Dibu" and TV series mi familia es un dibujo (Patagonik film Group), and scenes of the film Ogu y Mampaton ( Hook Up Animation). He has also worked in various animated commercials. In the field of illustration collaborated with Spanish publishers Edebe, Planeta De Agostini, Vicens Vives, Bromera, Imaginarium and Estudio Fenix. He also did work for Alfaguara, El Gato de Hojalata, Pictus, Clasa, Grupo Editorial Norma, Puerto de Palos and Ediciones Urano from Argentina and Santillana from Puerto Rico, United States and UK. Jonathan was born in 1965, the son of a rig fitter and a primary school teacher. He first developed his skills as a writer and illustrator while studying architecture, illustrating poems and lyrics that he had written. After leaving college, he worked as an architect for several years, before pursuing a career in children's books. In addition to writing books such as Bringing Down the Moon, and Ruby Flew Too, he also paper-engineers pop-up books.