Begin with the right book
Having spent a few years working as a children’s bookseller, I have a go-to-response for kids who claim they don’t like books. “You probably don’t hate reading,” any good kidlit pusher will say, “You just haven’t read the right story yet.” At the time, I had skin in the game, of course — more readers meant more customers — but at base I was part of a staff of book lovers who wanted to share our obsessions with a new generation. Nobody gets into the publishing business for the money.
In The Good Little Book by Kyo Maclear, illustrated by Marion Arbona (Tundra, 40pp, $19, ages 5 – 9), a grumpy little boy gets sent into the family study for a timeout. With nothing else to do, he pulls a book off the shelf, the “Good Little Book,” whose cover matches the book that readers currently hold in their hand, a meta little gag that will surely amuse. The boy is not usually a reader, but the Good Little Book draws him in. “It didn’t turn him into a bookish boy, or improve his naughty behaviour,” goes the story, “But it did become a loyal companion.”
Books can be overly romanticized, especially in the digital age. The Good Little Book eschews being a didactic story on the virtues of paper versus a screen (those stories are plentiful, trust me). It’s an appeal to children who don’t fancy themselves readers, telling them, “There’s room for you in this world, too—and we think you’ll like it here.” When Zoe Webster, the teen protagonist in Stephanie Tromly’s Trouble is a Friend of Mine (Kathy Dawson Books, 336 pp, $21, ages 14+), meets Philip Digby, she thinks he is rude and irritating, so of course the book becomes a countdown until the two fall in love. Digby (as he’s called) embodies the type of smarmy obnoxiousness that would be unbearable were he a kid you actually knew in high school, yet is irresistible on the page, an archetype that teen readers might think was invented for YA literature until they read their first Jane Austen novel.
Tromly sticks her wise-beyond-their-years characters in a plot worthy of their precocity, as the pair find themselves embroiled in solving a high-stakes mystery centring on a local missing girl. It’s a whip fast ride that is occasionally too clever for its own good, but never boring.