EMILY BEARN on books for Christmas
Books with elves and twinkling Christmas trees on the cover inevitably have a limited shelf life – but this year’s crop of festive picture books are nonetheless too pretty to resist. Christmas Street (Nosy Crow, 20pp, £14.99) by Jonathan Emmett is a sumptuous board book, featuring a pull out play scene and gentle tuition in the ABC. (‘I is for ICING, on freshly baked cakes. J is for JINGLE, the sound a bell makes.’)
And every bookish toddler will be familiar with Julia Donaldson’s Tales from Acorn
Wood, in which Fox loses his socks, and Rabbit has difficulty napping. Twenty years after the series began comes the sixth instalment, Squirrel’s
Snowman (Macmillan, 12pp, £6.99), in which Donaldson uses her hypnotic rhyming text to tell the story of a squirrel struggling to find the necessary adornments for her snowman. (‘Squirrel’s snowman has a head./ Now he needs a nose./ Can Squirrel find a carrot?/ What do you suppose?’) And Constance in
Peril (Two Hoots, 32pp, £12.99), by the new dream team Ben Manley and Emma Chichester Clark, tells the witty story of a doll from a bygone age, who struggles to cope with the indignities of modern life. ‘Edward’s favourite toy was a soft, old, cloth doll. Her name was Constance Hardpenny and she had led a tragic life.’
For older readers, The Bear Who Sailed the Ocean on an Iceberg by Emily Critchley (Everything with Words, 288pp, £7.99) is the enchanting story of a boy who finds a hungry, loquacious polar bear in his parent’s freezer. How did he get there, and can Patrick’s pocket money cover the cost of Monty’s sardines? And in Sally Nicholls’s Time-seekers novels, our heroes Alex and Ruby have already survived a Victorian Christmas, an Edwardian crime caper, and the French Revolution. A Secret in
Time (Nosy Crow, 208pp, £6.99) is the fourth book in the series, and finds the children tumbling through the magic mirror into the freezing winter of 1947. Sisters of the Lost
(Chicken House, 336pp, £7.99) is the latest Gothic delight by the former school teacher Lucy Strange. This time, writing with familiar aplomb, Strange tells the story of six motherless girls, a cruel and superstitious father – and a daughter who threatens to bring curses on the family when she mysteriously vanishes into thin air. (‘Be sure the first girl marries well,/ The second in the home to dwell.’) And children with an appetite for crime will find plenty to relish in
The Very Merry Murder Club
(Farshore, 432pp, £12.99), a collection of 13 sinister Christmas tales, edited by Serena Patel and Robin Stevens. As with Stevens’s
Murder Most Unladylike series, this is crime at is comforting best.
In the rush of new titles at Christmas, the classics can be overlooked. But Journey to the
River Sea by the late Eva Ibbotson, telling the story of an orphaned girl sent to live with her cousins in the Amazon, should be in every child’s library – and is now available in a sumptuous new 20th-anniversary edition, illustrated by Katie Hickey (Macmillan, 336pp, £20). And it would not be Christmas without a feminist retelling of an ancient myth. In
Medusa (Bloomsbury, 224pp, £14.99), Jessie Burton reimagines the story of Medusa’s exile to a far-flung island, at the whim of the capricious gods. By focusing on Medusa’s internal struggles, and by adding some box-set drama to her relationship with Perseus, Burton turns one of Greek mythology’s most contested figures into a heroine fit for modern fiction.
And dinosaurs always feature heavily in the Christmas non-fiction lists – but if we are to believe
Everything You Know About Dinosaurs is Wrong!
(Nosy Crow, 64pp, £12.99) by Dr Nick Crumpton, illustrated by Gavin Scott, we’ve all been barking up the wrong tree. ‘Very new fossils have made some paleontologists believe that DIPLODOCUS’S eyes might have been protected from the sun by bony eye-shades’ is among the many revelations designed to make budding young scientists rethink their assumptions.