Hello naughty elephant and welcome back, Pobble

Charlotte Ross chooses books to enrapture a young child
Clara - books
28 November 2013

When your child becomes old enough to begin hearing the stories you loved as a child it is a relief and a treat. Suddenly, you are the expert and not the novice parent blundering through the shelves of the Owl Bookshop, duped into paying for hip imagery only to discover a wisp of a tale that barely stands up to a single telling, never mind the endless repetition your little darling will demand.

And so, since the summer, I have once again crossed the Atlantic in a peach, courtesy of Roald Dahl, been up and down the Magic Faraway Tree as I introduce my nearly-four-year-old to the hard drug that is Enid Blyton, and charmed her off to sleep with the wide-eyed domestic cosiness of Joyce Lankester Brisley’s Milly Molly Mandy books.

These are books so vivid in imagery and clear of prose that you can recall precise sentences along with the feelings they evoked some decades earlier. And there are just enough illustrations to keep a young child rapt.

But this is all future training. For, right now, picture-heavy books still rule. The trick is to find the ones with stories that hold their own against the visuals, that ignite a tiny imagination as much with language as with images. Here are a few that most little children, and their parents, should be happy to find in a stocking this Christmas.

Capitalising on the success of last year’s Clara Button book, the V&A has brought out Clara and the Wedding Day Surprise, written by Amy de la Haye and decoratively drawn by Emily Sutton (V&A Publishing, £11.99). Clara is quite the little haberdasher, and this book sees her visiting the bric-a-brac stalls and sewing shops of Portobello Road in order to customise an outfit for a special wedding. It all goes wrong, and Clara ends up with a rather more colourful costume than she planned. And then it all goes right again, when the wedding turns out to be a lavish Hindu celebration. Middle-class mummies will be happy to see so many creative, cultural, educational and ethnically aware boxes ticked in one volume.

Doing away with words altogether is the magical Welcome to Mamoko, by Polish duo Aleksandra Mizielinska and Daniel Mizielinski (Big Picture Press, £12.99). A kind of groovy Where’s Wally?, this picture book invites you to find a cast of characters, plus their missing shoes and cheese, hidden among various super-detailed cityscapes. Make up your own stories as you go.

Mamoko is reminiscent of the childs-eye worldviews of Richard Scarry, who has risen from the grave after 20 years to deliver Best Lowly Worm Book Ever (HarperCollins, £12.99). Meticulously completed by his son Huck Scarry, Lowly Worm is published to mark 50 years of the iconic American author and follows the humble invertebrate through a day as he meets the best-loved of Scarry’s animal cast.

Also celebrating 50 years is a special edition of British writer John Burningham’s classic Borka, The Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers (Cape, £19.99). The tearjerking tale of a bald gosling seeking his place in the world — which is ultimately among friends in Kew Gardens — is important emotional fodder for soft-skinned pre-schoolers who’ve yet to face hardship and rejection.

Also making kids face up to tricky consequences is David Walliams, who has ventured into the nursery zone with The Slightly Annoying Elephant, illustrated by Tony “Little Princess” Ross (HarperCollins, £12.99). Young Sam has to cope with a large belligerent elephant coming to stay, rather like the Tiger Who Came to Tea, but with more friends, fewer manners and a penchant for pooing in the garden. That’s what you get for adopting an elephant at the zoo, daddy.

And for lovers of Lear, Julia Donaldson of Gruffalo fame has rustled up a poetic sequel in The Further Adventures of the Owl and the Pussy-cat, with charming pictures by Charlotte Voake (Puffin Books, £10.99). She keeps to the rhyme and rhythm and honours the romance of the original, while swapping the pea green boat for a blue hot-air balloon and visiting a mash-up of Lear characters, from the Pobble who has no toes to the Dong with his luminous nose in pursuit of a stolen ring. It all turns out splendidly, of course, and “they danced a jig with the Turkey and Pig, Then sang to the Owl’s guitar, O dearest love, by the stars up above, How delightfully happy we are, We are, we are, How delightfully happy we are.”

Who knows, it might turn out to be a classic of Christmas Yet to Come.

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