EMILY BEARN on books for all ages
Children’s fiction has come under increasing fire for being too political – but this spring’s picture books offer the world weary young reader plenty of scope for escapism.
Mister Toots (Harper Collins, £12.99) is another gem of a picture book by Emma Chichester Clark, author of the beloved Blue
Kangaroo series. This time, she tells the story of a family of dogs whose friendship with a strange creature that can only say ‘Toot!’ demonstrates that lack of a common language is no barrier to affection. ‘They loved him with all their hearts. Everybody did.’ When Cherry Lost Terry (Old Street, £12.99), by The
Oldie’s sub-editor Penny Phillips, tells the enchanting story of a cat who loses his mysterious friend Terry, and must enlist the help of all the animals in the alphabet in order to track him down. ‘ “Oh, please,” twitched a squirrel named Sue, / “Won’t someone decide what to do?”/ She skittered and hopped – / Then suddenly stopped / As out of a bush sprang … GUESS WHO?’ Illustrated by Clare Mallison. And The Spring Rabbit (Frances Lincoln, £7,99) is an uplifting Easter story by Angela Mcallister, following the adventures of a girl called Spring, who wakes from her snowbound slumber to discover the miracles of new life. ‘One winter morning, a sunbeam slipped between the trees and danced on the glistening snow. Its warm touch stirred Spring from her long sleep.’
For older readers, Ambrose Follows His Nose (Puffin, £10.99) is a newly discovered story by the late and much loved Dick King-smith, who celebrates his centenary this year. The story follows the adventures of a young friend who befriends a rabbit with a supernatural sense of smell (‘Ambrose has a very sensitive nose … a nose like a bloodhound’), and was completed by the author’s great-granddaughter Josie Rogers, who cleverly preserves his crisp prose and anarchic humour. The Thief Who Sang Storms (Usborne, £7.99) is the much awaited new fantasy by Sophie Anderson, author of The Girl Who Speaks Bear. This time, our heroine is Linnet, who lives on a magical island where the humans mans and the bird-people have become divided. When her father is captured, it will fall to her to save him, and unite her homeland. Fantasy lovers will also find plenty to relish in The Sky Beneath the Stone (Floris, £7.99) by the debut author Alex Mullarky, which follows the plight of Ivy North, a reticent 13-year-old who is thrust into adventure when a sorcerer turns her younger brother into a kestrel. And in historical fiction, The Ship of Doom by MA Bennett (Welbeck, £6.99) charts the adventures of a girl called Luna, who discovers that her aunt’s boringsounding ‘Butterfly Club’ at the Greenwich Observatory has a most mysterious secret. Soon Luna finds herself transported in time to 1912, and tasked with saving Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless radio from the Titanic. And Jummy at the River School (Chicken House, £6.99) by the debut author Sabine Adeyinka is a sumptuous adventure set in ‘the illustrious River School, the best boarding school for girls in Southern Nigeria’. Fans of Mallory
Towers will find plenty of midnight feasts and ‘giggling late into the night in the dorms’, but there are also serious themes of poverty and inequality.
And no young literature student should be without Shakespeare for Everyone by Emma Roberts (Magic Cat, £14.99), a deceptively informative reference book which gallops us through Shakespeare’s life and complete works in 64 jauntily illustrated pages. Covering everything from Dogberry’s foolery to the structure of a sixain, this is a children’s book which will have much to offer the self-improving grandparent. And anything calling itself a ‘book of feelings’ might send some grandparents running for cover. But Sometimes by Stephanie Stansbie (Little Tiger Press, £6.99) is an exemplar of its genre, using immersive rhyming text to tell the heartwarming story of two children navigating the emotional ups and downs of a typical day. ‘Your body’s full of feelings: / like the tide, they ebb and flow. / Sometimes they lift you high / and sometimes they bring you low.’