Picture books for children – reviews
Meet Arlo: a big, squishy cushion of a lion with such a fantastically textured mane you feel you could reach into Catherine Rayner’s new book and pick crumbs out of his wild locks. The trouble is, Arlo simply can’t sleep. He’s miserable and exhausted. Until he meets Owl, who teaches him how to unwind.
There’s a real art to creating a bedtime story that can slow buzzing children down. Pace, repetition and the conjuring of a cosy, comforting world are key, as classics such as Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon perfectly demonstrate. Arlo the Lion Who Couldn’t Sleep (20 August, Macmillan) hits the spot. It’s lovely to imagine families everywhere making Owl’s bedtime song their own: “Have a good stretch from your nose to your toes / Do a little wiggle, let your eyes gently close…”
Hitchhikers are a rare breed nowadays so the context for The Ride (Tate) by Brazilian author-illustrator Guilherme Karsten could need some explaining to kids. But the ragtag bunch of misfits trying to get a lift down to the beach with a surfer might be familiar, from the red-caped girl escaping a wolf to the retired superhero pulling a wheelie case. While some of the rhyming doesn’t trip off the tongue as easily as you’d like, this book is such a riot – full of eye-popping pictures the colour of ketchup and hazy sunshine – that it’s a joy to be along for the ride.
Monsieur Roscoe is also off to the beach… and the mountains, and a lake. Phew-ee! As he runs around, everything and everyone he encounters is labelled in both English and French, for this is a story with a difference: it’s bilingual to help young children learn French. With Monsieur Roscoe on Holiday (Hodder), Jim Field, the bestselling creator of Oi Frog!, has created a vibrant Richard Scarry-esque world full of chatty animals, where, alongside vocab, there are phrases to learn (including true essentials such as: Il pleut! It’s raining!). Cleverly, the story itself never suffers. And the book feels solid enough to survive sun-cream splats and soggy tent corners if you take it away with you.
It does feel like efforts are being made in the children’s publishing world to be more diverse, with a small but notable increase of late in new picture books starring BAME characters (Julian Is a Mermaid, The Girls, Billy and the Beast…). But if this were an end-of-term report, it would have to say “must try harder”, judging by conversations emerging from this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. According to the website of Lantana, an indie publisher of diverse and inclusive children’s books: “In the UK, a third of schoolchildren identify as black, Asian or minority ethnic yet fewer than 5% of children’s books feature BAME main characters and fewer than 2% of children’s book creators are British authors of colour.”
Happily, Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola are two such young talents who are getting the attention they deserve. Launched with a bang last year, their debut book about a space-obsessed chatterbox called Rocket, Look Up!, was shortlisted for multiple prizes. Now Rocket is jetting off to Jamaica with her family to visit Grammy and Grampy in Clean Up! (23 July, Puffin). Bryon’s text and Adeola’s pictures work well together to capture the fizzing energy of young children and, as Rocket sets about sorting the plastic pollution she encounters on Grampy’s beach, there’s also a positive environmental message.
One of Lantana’s gems this season was planned long before Covid-19 but feels like a perfect response to the anxiety experienced by many children because of lockdown and the change in their routine. Taking Time by Jo Loring-Fisher (7 September) is a poem witnessing children all over the world as they interact with nature – listening to the sea in a shell, watching a spider weave its home. A timely reminder to appreciate the small things. Just like Arlo the Lion Who Couldn’t Sleep, it’s a soothing balm in book form.
• To order any of these books for a special price, click on the titles or go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
