There comes a time when a child realises she knows something, maybe lots, that her parents don’t. Their paths become distinct from one another. Here, with pictures like chalky lithographs and with creatures a little reminiscent of Maurice Sendak’s wild things, Melissa Castillon guides us and Winnie through storms to build a bridge between the…
Computer-drawn with a limited palette reminiscent of 50’s picture books or even Soviet ones of the 1930s, No Such Thing welcomes us into Georgia’s world, where things can go awry, but there is always a rational explanation. No such things as ghosts! But Ella Bailey has fun with décalage, the French term for words and…
Even mums sometimes need a little peace and this classic communicates with humour (and more realism than you might expect of an elephant family) this simple truth. For a child learning to appreciate that its folks have needs and wishes too, this is a lovely book to share with a parent. Conversations can open up,…
If anyone was destined to create a book helping children to know the futility of war, and to do so without judging those who fight in them, it was Michael Foreman. Of his four uncles three died in the First World War and one, called Christmas, died of wounds on the first Christmas Day after…
Deservedly a classic, this is a joy to share with a child or for her to explore by herself. Allan Ahlberg’s jolly rhymes lead us cunningly round a circle, meeting familiar characters of nursery and legend. As we travel there are so many things to find, such enjoyable mischief and muddle along the way, delightfully…
‘Just on the other side of the wall’. Ah, how often did the young Frances Hodgson Burnett wonder what lay there, when by the sudden death of her father she was plunged from middle-class comfort into years of precariousness like her heroine Sara, the princess of this story (and surely so like the young and indeed…
This is Michael Foreman’s first book, written by his then wife Janet Charters, and it sets a course he has followed for sixty years of illustrating and creating children’s books, often with a theme of peace. General Jodhpur would really like to be the most famous general in the world, until one day a fox…
A great marriage of writer and illustrator tells the story of Ernest Shackleton’s polar expedition, the icebound Endurance, the months of camping out on the ice floe and the astonishing rescue which saw all the men survive. Text which is succinct but full of telling detail is matched by illustrations that make it all real…
I came across this book when I was about 10. I remember finding it on the classroom library shelf (I think second shelf down and about a third in from the left – the memory is that vivid!) and feeling that it was in some way important. It was the first story I read which…
Published in 1963, when it won first prize in Scandinavia for fiction for older readers, the telling of the tale has not outdated it, for it is a kind of timeless pilgrim’s progress, as well as an odyssey across Europe. David knows his name and, he sometimes feels, little else. A journey, then, of self-discovery….
Sam is 11 and he’s dying of leukaemia. He reckons he’ll be dead by the time you finish the book. This is his journal. We meet his cynical, adventurous best mate Felix from the hospital, his Mum, doing her best to hold it all together, his Dad, trying to pretend it’s not happening, his little…
Like No! by Marta Altes, this is built round a joke: the elephant who is good at hiding – sort of. Certainly the boy and his folks don’t find him. But boy’s dog spots him, not fooled by the curtains, the telly or the tree. So lots of fun for the child who has, maybe…
