The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Bedtime reading with added bounce
Last hurrahs by two giants of children’s fiction led a year of anarchic animals and big troubles, says Emily Bearn
It takes wisdom to write a good picture book, and this year it was the nonagenarians who showed us how to do it. The Ups and Downs of the
Castle Mice (Bodley Head, £12.99), by the late Paddington author Michael Bond, is an enchanting story – with a mischievous final twist – about a family of mice living inside a doll’s house belonging to a rich earl.
Another posthumous treat was The Curse of the School Rabbit (Harper Collins, £12.99) by Judith Kerr, author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea, who died this year aged 95. Telling the gently anarchic story of Snowflake, an unruly rabbit who is blamed for a family’s escalating misfortunes, Kerr’s final story shows that she never lost her ability to see the world through a child’s eyes. And it would not be Christmas without a new tale from 92-year-old Shirley Hughes. In Angel on the Roof (Walker, £12.99), she recounts the adventures of a boy who befriends an angel, resulting in a story that is touching but never soppy, with even the most celestial scenes brought down to earth by Hughes’s charmingly domestic illustrations.
SEVEN PLUS
Novels set in Chinese takeaways are thin on the ground, which makes Sue Cheung’s debut, Chinglish (Andersen, £7.99), a rare gem. Written as a diary, it tells the poignant and ultimately uplifting story of a 13-year-old girl whose dreams of becoming an artist clash with the reality of life in a cramped flat above a family-run Chinese joint in Coventry.
We Won an Island (Nosy Crow, £6.99) by Charlotte Lo is another stunning debut, in which a young girl hopes that her family’s move to a remote Scottish island will help her father to overcome his depression: “I missed Dad’s smile. If he just gave the island a chance, I was sure he’d find it again.” Unusually for a children’s book, there are no villains – and even the billionaire turns out to be benevolent. The Time of Green Magic (Macmillan, £12.99), by the veteran Hilary McKay, winner of last year’s Costa, is a spellbinding story about step-siblings drawn together by mysterious goings-on in their new home. “Abi couldn’t yet grasp what she’d seen, except somehow, once again there had been magic in the house.”
Magic also pervades Sam Copeland’s debut, Charlie Changes into a Chicken (Puffin, £6.99), about a boy who can change into animals. “One minute he’s a normal boy, the next minute he’s a wolf. Or an armadillo.” There is plenty of comedy, but this is also a smart observation of childhood anxiety, currently one of publishing’s favourite themes. And young fantasy lovers will find a feast of Leviathans and grumpy
Yetis in Frostheart (Puffin, £7.99), a gloriously imagined first novel by the illustrator Jamie Littler.
10 PLUS
For older readers, The Umbrella Mouse (Macmillan, £6.99) by Anna Fargher is the exquisite story of a mouse orphaned in the London blitz. Animals are easily sentimentalised in fiction, but Fargher invests her hero with the complexity of a human being, while minutely observing his rodent tics. Katherine Rundell continues her winning run with The Good Thieves (Bloomsbury, £12.99), a masterful thriller in which a young girl finds herself entangled in Prohibition-era New York’s criminal underworld. The Girl Who Speaks Bear (Usborne, £6.99) by Sophie Anderson, tells the story of Yanka, a young girl adopted by Siberian villagers after being found naked outside a bear cave. Siberia is also the setting for Nevertell (Walker, £7.99), an engrossing first novel by Katharine Orton. Telling the story of 12-year-old Lina, who escapes from a Soviet prison camp and is pursued across the snowbound wilderness by a vengeful sorceress and her pack of wolves, this is fantasy at its glutinous best.
NON-FICTION
The environment was the year’s dominant theme, with new books galore telling children how to save the planet. Vital as the message may be, titles such as What a Waste (DK Children, £9.99) by Jess French do not exactly cheer a Christmas stocking. But Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (Puffin, £12.99), in which the molecular biologist Sabina Radeva deftly boils down the theory of evolution to 48 beautifully illustrated pages, will be treasured for years to come. And no budding ornithologist should be without Matt Sewell’s Atlas of Amazing Birds (Pavilion, £16.99), in which sumptuous illustrations and brief captions tell us all we need to know. Here’s the entry for the Australian masked lapwing:
“It can’t stand people! This Ned Kelly of the bird world will fly at your head!”
In Judith Kerr’s final story, an unruly rabbit is blamed for a family’s escalating misfortunes