Jimmy and his little brother are evacuated to Wales along with some of his school. It’s the phoney war, so he doesn’t see the point and is hurting because of what’s happened at home. To make it worse his brother takes to it all like a duck to water and his best mate betrays him….
Beautifully done, this is a tale of moving to a new place and finding your feet and making friends. Artist Richard Jones has a great delicacy with colour and an expressive use of form and space. He has done a great job (and so have the Chinese printers) of making the lion almost, but not…
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…
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in 1963, when it won first prize in Scandinavia for fiction for older readers, the telling of the tale has not outdated it, for it is a kind of timeless pilgrim’s progress, as well as an odyssey across Europe.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…
A simple tale of hope, it may help a child who is wondering about how the world is that people find it hard to manage without barbed wire divisions. Gardens are not only unfazed by fences, they may actually use them to grow up and through and over. And the patience of a small boy,…
Today Croc is in a mood. Big-time sulks. But Melrose is not put off. She bombards Croc out his mood and down to the beach. Now Croc’s exuberance may take charge, till the wet sea – and an ice cream – bring all into balance. Gentle and fun, Emma Chichester Clark’s luminous pictures lift the…
What a combination – Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake! Playsmiths together. A tale full of subtlety. Parents worried about bills, Rosie picking up lolly sticks to keep in her old cigar box. Things are tight. But imagination is not; it’s very free. Words and pictures riot across the pages. Lollysticks turn into Stickerino the magnificent…
I was not surprised to read that Joseph Coelho is a poet, for this book is a poem in prose that touches what it is to reel from and then begin to find a balance after the loss of someone precious. The child narrator, we come to understand, mostly through the sensitive illustrations on which…
A lovely book for parents to share with a small child. Simple text and simple images, carefully chosen, carefully designed; it’s a vehicle for conveying love and helping a small child to feel welcome in the world and part of it. Buy through Bookshop.org
