Pepper and Me
By Beatrice Alemagna, Thames & Hudson
The little girl in this story falls and scrapes her knee. She doesn’t like the sight of blood and the scab that forms there scares her. It hangs around for ages, so the girl decides to name it Pepper. Pepper begins to talk and gradually becomes a tolerated companion wherever the girl goes. It’s such a quirky concept for a book, but the slowly healing scab – a feature of childhood – is very clever in capturing the way time passes when you’re a child: long days spent outside, trips to see grandparents, getting bored and making up stories. Pepper is there throughout, and by the time she goes, the girl has grown up a bit, and she’s learned how to live with something that once scared her.
The River’s A Singer: Selected Poems
By Valerie Bloom, illustrated by Sophie Bass, Macmillan Children’s Books
In this fabulous poetry collection by Valerie Bloom there are poems about families, food, animals, nature and more. Some are brilliantly funny – ‘My Dog was a Bloodhound’, ‘Warning’, ‘Flunked’ – Bloom is expert of the killer punchline. Others speak of the natural world – ‘Clouds’, ‘Rain’, ‘The River’. I love the array of colours she conjures in her opening poem, ‘Autumn Gilt’. The poems contain wonderful imagery, lyricism and word play, making this an enjoyable and accessible collection for children.
Open Wide!: Jawdropping Mouths of the Animal World
By Dr Letizia Diamante, illustrated by Ed J. Brown, What on Earth Books
You can learn a lot about an animal from its mouth, as I discovered in this fascinating book. It shows us all the different ways animals use their mouths – to eat, of course, but also to clean their young, build their homes, show how they feel, and more. Illustrations bring the facts to life and there are photographic zoom-ins that reveal some astonishing details. Having experienced the sandpaper lick of a cat, I was really interested to see the close-up of the backward-facing hooks on a cat’s tongue, which help it to groom itself. Children are particularly aware of teeth, with the loss of milk teeth and growth of adult teeth being so present for them, and I love the way this book taps into that experience.
Time for Bed, Animals
By Ben Lerwill, illustrated by Maribel Lechuga, Templar Books
This book makes for a lovely bedtime story. Each spread describes the sleep habits of a different species – dogs, bats, ants, chimpanzees, fish, giraffes, tortoises… “Chimpanzees build their own beds, using strong sticks and branches. They make their beds in trees.” With each species, we’re asked about our own sleepy habits. “What do you like best about your bed?” As well as learning interesting facts about different animals, the book encourages conversations about sleep. It made my 3-year-old think about what helps her at bedtime and created a wonderfully sleepy state before it was time to turn off the light.
Oh! Look, A Boat!
By Andrew J. Ross, Flying Eye Books
One day, a mouse finds a boat outside his front door and decides to climb aboard. Before he knows it, the boat carries him out to sea and takes him off around the world. I love the aesthetic of the little paper boat – such a fragile thing to carry such a great adventure. The big and bold illustrations tell the story beautifully and capture all the jeopardy and wonder the little mouse feels on his expedition. The repetition of the title is really enjoyable to read aloud with young children, and it’s very reassuring when he does eventually find his way home.
The History of Information
By Chris Haughton, with additional text and research by Loonie Park, DK
We are living in the Information Age, and this book tells the fascinating history of how we got here. In ten chapters – Language, Drawing, Writing, Printing, Science, News and newspapers, Networks, Broadcast, Disinformation, and Computers – Chris Haughton explores how information sharing and storing has shaped and changed our world. He travels back through time to first languages and early cave paintings, bringing us right up to how we communicate and record information today. The book is brilliantly designed, making some quite complex subjects accessible and visual. The speed of acceleration in our accumulation of information is staggering, as is the way this has so rapidly transformed our world. This is a remarkable (and perhaps, for some of us, slightly frightening) history.
The World to Come
By Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn, illustrated by Emily Sutton, Magic Cat Publishing
This book is an ode to nature. It speaks of the joy of passing time in this world. A collaboration between nature writer Robert Macfarlane and actor-musician Johnny Flynn, the lyrical and rhythmical words were originally a song, featuring on the album Lost in the Cedar Wood. The pages sing with the magic of nature as we journey with a father and son through woods, beside rivers, along the coast. Stunning illustrations, full of colour and texture, immerse us in the natural world. I particularly love the painterly birds, which are instantly identifiable, and it’s lovely to follow the playful otter who appears throughout the story. This is a book filled with love and hope for the world to come.
The Paper Bridge
By Joëlle Veyrenc, illustrated by Seng Soun Ratanavanh, Floris Books
Anya is a little girl made of paper. She lives in Paperlee, a paper village, whose inhabitants are all paper-light, like her. Every year, people put stones in their pockets to avoid being blown away by the late summer winds. But when Anya is knocked down by a gust of wind out of the windy season, she knows something isn’t right with the weather. Anya, who has a special talent for kirigami (the Japanese art of paper cutting and folding), makes a paper bridge to take her across the chasm to the unknown village of Forestlee to discover the cause of the devastating winds coming from that direction. The illustrations in this story are themselves created with kirigami by artist Seng Soun Ratanavanh. An intricate paper world, with 3D houses, folded foliage and illustrated characters, has been photographed for the book. The words and images together tell the story perfectly. The Paper Bridge is a metaphor for climate change; it asks us to think about how one society’s actions might impact another. This is a very special book.
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Reviews by Alice Ellerby
Published in issue 92. Accurate at the time this issue went to print.
